Skyrim Low FPS Strange Issues

Jeremytroid · August 16, 2013

I recently picked up the regular edition of Skyrim at my local store since it dropped to $20 bucks after the release of Legendary edition. Excitedly, I popped in the disk, waited for it to install and jumped in... Only to find that it performed horribley. I tried all kinds of .ini tweaks and supposed "game enhancing" mods. They both didn't work and some made the game unbearably ugly.

After a while, I figured I listen to none other than Linus Tech Tips in the background, so I pulled up a YouTube playlist and began the game. Surprisingly, there was a HUGE leap in performance. I mean from 15-20 FPS before to constant 60 after having the video play.

I suspected the cause was that Skyrim just used whatever processing power was available when the game launched, and that using YouTube "woke Up" enough processing power. So I used this ghetto fix for a little while but it ended up causing a lot of driver crashing problems.

For AMD CPU, the fix is to TURN OFF Cool n' Quiet. (I did so inside the BIOS, not sure if turning it off in software will be the same) My game has been running smoothly since then, without driver crashes or hiccups!

This is now a question thread. After that play session, the FPS tanked again. I am really at a loss what to do.