I have 3.4 ghz quad core with tri-sli 260 gtx's, 8gb of very high speed ram, 16gb for readyboost (useful for doing stuff on my other monitor) and skyrim installed on an SSD. Skyrim stuttered and lagged like crazy and took forever to load.

I eventually got tired of the poor performance and even worse shadows. So I googled turn shadows off skyrim and found a way to turn them off completely. My FPS instantly jumped from 30ish to 60ish. I was so upset. Bethesda royally messed up the shadows in this game. They look like garbage and take up all of the already restricted resources that the engine utilizes.

The game engine is simply not optimized for PC. It seems to use only a fraction of my computer's available resources. It's basically a console game made available for PC users with none of the advantages of being on a PC. The screw up on the shadows combined with the screw up on the lack of resource usage just combined together to make Skyrim perform very poorly on PC.

Flame-retardant appeal: I know, I know, making games is hard and all that. This is not intended as a flame or a troll post, just a hopefully helpful tip for PC-users with the same problem. Google turn off shadows, for +30 fps. (Since posting links to editing game files is frowned upon I won't post the link. It's an ini file, nothing major, just back it up.)

there is something else going on there because my friend has a much weaker CPU and a 285 card and the game runs just fine. check drivers and run defrag and check your HDD for errors etc. also i remember seeing a shadow mod on nexus that increase performance for peopel using medium shadow settings and they actually looked better than the vanilla high settings, at least in the screenshots they did.

There is something really weird going on with this game and my card ... If I set the card too high (even with my fan set to 100%, so there's no chance of the card overheating), then -a- my Tab/No/Escape key stops working at some point, and about 5 minutes thereafter -b- the game crashes, taking my computer with it. If I set the card just a bit lower, with the fan at 50% (this means the card does heat up some, but not much), neither of these things happen.

I don't have this problem with other games ...

I think I'll look into disabling shadows. You're right: they are [censored] anyway.

Get a better PC. That's how to not stutter on PC.... :rolleyes:

ive heard that the game uses cpu to process shadows instead of gpu resulting in performance hog.

hopefully they fix this issue in the future.

Yay another unhelpful [censored]

Shadows are total crap. My biggest hope for something to be addressed in a patch. Even "ultra" shadows are total crap. Only way to get acceptable shadows is to reduce draw distance and bump shadow map up to 4096 which taxes even powerful computers.

I'm not sure what they could do but do something, shadows don't require as much system resources as the entire rest of the game for lots of titles out there and the shadows look alot better.

I think shadows are handled by the CPU which is what makes it horrible.

How was that unhelpful? I have no stuttering issues, thus my PC is good enough to play at max without issues.

Yes their shadows are indeed horrible, as it is you can have high-ish quality shadows on a very small area or very low quality shadows on a large area. I do wish they weren't handled by the CPU.

It was unhelpful because: 1. saying "Get a better PC" is not an intelligent answer to the problem of a horribly un-optimized game that should never have been released in this state and, 2. "my PC is good enough to play at max without issues" makes you sound like a boasting [censored]. That "answer" does not help the OP in any way.

Disabling shadows would be a too big immersion breaker in my opinion.
My game doesn't stutter much. Have you installed the 4GB fix?

I play otherwise on Ultra 1080p graphics, but have done these changes:
- AA from 8 to 4
- AF from 16 to 8
- Long distance LOD detail from Ultra to High
- Outside shadow draw distance from 8000 to 2500 (Same as inside. Makes shadows look less blocky too)

FPS increased from around 40 to 60. My specs are in my sig. I have HD texture mods installed, extra land and tree shadows etc.