The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim lags on medium settings

[Chung Ae]

Below is the specification of the system that I am using.

• Intel Core 2 Duo (2.13Ghz)
• 2GB DDR2 RAM
• Nvidia 9600GSO 786MB and 192 Bit

I found that the Skyrim launcher detects and sets on medium settings with 1920x1080p/Medium/Low Fading/No reflection/Texture Quality Hi/No AA or AF... Initially I noticed that it was running smoothly but now I am experiencing a LAG which is pretty annoying as I move into Bleak Falls Barrow. However the game runs Smooth as silk at 1280 x 720. Guys tell me what to do to get this running smooth as silk at current settings 1080p? I am also using Xbox PC controller.

[Badmannah]

I would like to tell you that the GPU you are using is very weak for 1920x1080 gaming. It just can't produce all those pixels fast enough. Also, some indoor areas have serious overdraw issues where the game draws a lot of stuff that never ends up visible on the screen (made worse by tons of overlapping lights), putting even more strain on the GPU's pixel pushing prowess. I think your best bet is to play at a lower resolution or get a better video card.

[DevenderD]

I have another thought for this issue that your computer is just barely minimum spec for Skyrim and is significantly lower than the recommended.

[Halle]

The CPU doesn't really do anything involving pixels in any game made in the past 12 years or so, so if you're ok with the frame rate you get at very low resolutions all you need is a better video card to run higher res. Also, if you are running 32-bit Windows you won't see a lot of benefit from having more than 3 GBs of RAM on the computer. The game itself will never be able to use more than 2 GB unless you do that large address aware hack some have been mentioning, but it's probably a bug if the game ever tries to allocate even that much. Having much more than the game needs will let the OS use the extra as HDD cache.

[Daksha90]

You must make use of 2xGTX480 SLI and up. I don’t think that a couple 460's might do it. But even if you do throw in some serious graphics hardware you will just find out that you are also CPU bound. Skyrim is hungry as hell for CPU and raw memory bandwidth too on higher settings. Your current rig simply can't push that much information across the bus fast enough for 1080P. If you can OC the entire system you should see a boost but I doubt you'll get it stable unless you're on water.

[Chakradevroy]

If you think that there is some flaw in the game then you can also try by reinstalling the game. There are also some chances that reinstalling will get you out of the issue. So do this and let us know if this was helpful to you.

[MACALL]

You must make use of 2xGTX480 SLI and up. I don’t think that a couple 460's might do it. But even if you do throw in some serious graphics hardware you will just find out that you are also CPU bound. Skyrim is hungry as hell for CPU and raw memory bandwidth too on higher settings. Your current rig simply can't push that much information across the bus fast enough for 1080P. If you can OC the entire system you should see a boost but I doubt you'll get it stable unless you're on water.

I think that a single card would be better for this game right now, since multi-card configurations haven’t been optimized for Skyrim yet. Also a single GTX 460 will max the game at a 1920x1080 resolution fine. It is true that game is very CPU bound. Even I drop down to 45FPS in Whiterun.

[Shae]

This game is heavily Ram/CPU/Video card dependant. Unfortunately for your machine if your experiencing lag then your first priority is bump up the ram. 2 GB by todays standards is 1/2 of the minimum now required as 4gb is recommended. Your CPU is heavily bottlenecking the game too while this game is video card dependant somewhat too. It is very CPU dependant. There is so much dynamic things being created cpu side that the misconception that your video card is playing the biggest roll in smooth frame rates is totally absurd even with low/medium range video cards, you can obtain a very smooth gameplay experience PROVIDED you have plenty of ram and a lot of CPU juice to go with it.

[Wyl]

Unless you have a way to get a used one (probably a bad idea), you won't be able to get a 4870. They stopped making them quite a while ago. You want a new HD 5770 or HD 6770. They give the same amount of performance and are pretty cheap. You can get used Core 2 Duo E8400/E8500/E8600 processors for not too much, and they are still pretty fast. So if you are very short on money, you can still upgrade within your motherboard's limits.

[Bubboy]

I think that 400 is on the low end, especially if it's a generic PSU as those are historically made of the cheapest trash the manufacture can locate so the rails will very likely fail if they actually hit sustained load for any real length.

[Sudhamay]

I also think that the specification is the problem for this issue and you must upgrade your system in order to avoid this.