frame rate problems in skyrim :(

[dtmwerks ●]

So I posted this in Skyrim-help but got no responses so hoping I can get more help here.

I've got some framerate issues that usually only occur outside, and it seems hard to predict what will cause it, although I might guess it is when I first get to an area (fast travel) or there a lot going on (all that snow falling looks great but maybe slows me down?). Also seems to happen after a few hours of gameplay, and immediately and drastically improves when I restart the game.

Some other issues are random crashes to desktop perhaps once every other day, and graphical issues where 3 objects so far at different times (lydia, a snow bear, and a dragon) had ridiculously low resolution yet everything else was fine. Their colors were also messed up. Restarting the game fixed it.

It recommended high settings so that's what i'm playing at. I'm also not sure how to check exactly what my pc parts are called, but I remember it's 8 gigs of ram, 1gb graphics card Nvidia 560 or something, and I5. I was told this would be overkill for Skyrim and that people with worse parts are running it on ultra ><

Not sure how much weight to put into it, but the windows experience index rated everything 7.4-7.6 (out or 7.9) like processor, ram, graphics, and gaming graphics. the only low thing was 5.9 which is primary hard disk (disk data transfer rate). Could that be the cause? Is there a way to check through some program if everything is running optimally? This PC is only like a month or two old, so not sure what the issue is. Also plays sc2 for hours and hours on high fine, but different games I guess.

Some reading around says they can patch it the way they did for fallout new vegas since many others seem to have the issue. Also, people are saying Skyrim is optimized for only dual cores, aka, my extra cores are doing nothing, and perhaps a patch will fix this? Not sure what the problem is and am pretty noobish with computers.

Any help is appreciated! Thanks.

edit: parts are

windows 7 64 bit
i5-2500K CPU @3.30GHz (4 CPUs)
8GB ram
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460

I'm seeing in my dxdiag thing, that "current display mode" is "1920 x 1080 (32 bit) (60hz). Is that ok?

[Evil-i ●]

Just a wild stab in the dark, but have you downloaded the latest drivers for your video card?

[dtmwerks ●]

I believe so, at least I did like a month ago and sc runs fine on high.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/615805-t ... m/61024591

seems like these guys have very similar problems, but it's interesting that theres such wide variation between the type of rigs that have problems. Also, no one has been talking about how they're FPS drops during gameplay. It would seem my FPS is fine when for a few hours, then randomly drops and restarting the game fixes it. Everyone talks about their FPS problems as if it is constant =/

I guess i'll have to go DL one of those programs that lets u check FPS during a game. I heard about fraps or something?