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skyrim cpu core scaling

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davegl1234

Weaksauce
Joined
Aug 14, 2010
Messages
75
Hi,

Just a fairly simple question about cpu core scaling in general, related to running skyrim.

Basically I have 580 SLI and just loaded up Skyrim, thinking the cards would be good enough for ultra. I also have a i7 920 @ 3.8.

I was getting fps in low 30's dipping into high 20's just from the start, as you roll into the first village on the carriage.

At first I thought it might be a gpu driver/SLI thing as gpu usage was low. Then I tried it with one card, and got the same fps, without maxing gpu usage. I figured maybe it was a cpu bottleneck...so i monitored my cpu usage and tried it again.

Overall cpu usage was about 50% when fps starts to drop, but across cores four cores the max usage i was seeing was about 60%.....At first i thought it thus wasn't a cpu bottleneck..

But then some games don't scale well across multiple cores, so i guess rather than seeing two of the cores at say 90% usage and the others hardly used, windows would share the load between all four cores, and give me the 60% max usage?

I.e what i am seeing is without doubt a cpu bottleneck (because skyrim scales terribly over more than two cores)...and if i did want to get better fps at ultra, my only choice would be to invest in a sandy bridge (no patches would ever really make much difference)?

Thanks for clarification.
 
I think something else is at play. You shouldn't be getting those frame rates with that hardware. I don't believe that Skyrim is CPU limited on a 3.8Ghz 920, considering that is faster than about 90% of PCs.
 
hmmm...i would like to believe that. Even if select high settings i get low 40's as the carriage approaches the first village and it crests the hill as the snow fades away. I would of thought my setup would be capable of more that that...i can't even image thats a particularly taxing part of the game.

But then from the tests i've run i can't explain it any other way.

Two cards give me the same fps as one card, and neither attempt give 100% gpu usage.

Lowering the resolution makes no difference.

Increasing the AA makes no difference.

Also, if i monitor the cpu i get about 50% overall cpu usage across four cores, but if i limit the game to two cores I max out those two cores but get the same fps...it seems the game is only ever using two cores.

I can't think of any other explanation than the game doesn't scale over two cores and half of my current cpu is imiting the fps regardless of my powerful graphics cards.

Any other suggestion would be welcome...i admit i'm a bit of noob at this.
 
Are you using the newest drivers? Are you sure SLI is correctly enabled? Is maybe one of your cards/slots breaking?
 
I didn't check my CPU usage, but I also have a 580 and I was able to get 60+ FPS with Ultra and the extra shadows, 4x MSAA, and TRMSAA turned on in control panel. I don't believe the 2600K is that much faster than the 920 in this game.
 
I'm using the latest drivers (the one released yesterday with the SLI profile for skyrim), and have no SLi issues with any other games (and like i say the same problems exist with just one card).

Battlefield 3 gives mostly 60 fps with dips into 50's occasionally on ultra settings if thats any indication of pc health.

I hear this is an updated gamebryo engine and that engine hated my system as well ....i remember about a year ago (actually it was a 5970 instead of the 580's at the time) I came to Oblivion late and was trying to get it to play on my system and i was getting high 20's in the imperial city with no mods...in fact thinking about it, it at least seemed like a cpu bottleneck with similar testing then too...it seemed to be if there were people on the screen rather than anything else.

I have been reading about SLI problems...but then people with faster cpu's and the same gpu's have no issues in SLI scaling.
 
My full system:

i7 920 @ 3.8
580 SLI
6 GB corsair dominaotr RAM
p6td deluxe motherboard
Asus d2x sound card
corsair 1200 ax power supply
ocz vertex ssd hard drive
 
I looked at the cpu scaling. It seemed clock speed made a big difference. Look at the THG review. With settings on ultra, an OC of 4 from 3.3 on an i5 was almost 20fps. So they say its close to 50/50 scaling. OC that to bad boy into the 4s and watch your fps climb.
 
I have the exact same problem. Running 4xAA, 16xAF, everything maxed at 1920x200, as the carriage approaches the village, my FPS drops to 27-30. I have a single GTX 580 and 2500k both at stock. Using the latest beta driver.
 
My brother uses 2 x EVGA GTX 570 classifieds and a 2600K at stock with beta drivers and has zero issues with everything maxed out.
 
IsaacMM said:
I have the exact same problem. Running 4xAA, 16xAF, everything maxed at 1920x200, as the carriage approaches the village, my FPS drops to 27-30. I have a single GTX 580 and 2500k both at stock. Using the latest beta driver.
Click to expand...

I'm running the same thing (except with a 69502GB unlocked) except my 2500K is @ 4.2Ghz. 60FPS consistently. Try clocking the 2500k up a bit, even for just a minute to see if it makes a difference.
 
There is definitely something strange going on with you guys. Although I haven't been able to get the game working properly across triple monitors, I have played it at 1920x1200, and the game is barely taxed with my setup using around 50% of the GPUs with maximum settings.

I'm using a i7 920 @ 4.0GHz and 2 x GTX580 3GB cards.
 
So it would seem that at higher settings, outdoors the game is very CPU dependent. This wouldn't be that bad (we have some pretty beefy CPUs now) except that the game really doesn't take advantage of multi-core much. Although the game uses something like 30threads, it seems the main workload really only gets distributed across 2. So our fancy 4,6 and 8 core CPUs (and the general trend of the industry of getting more power via parallelism vs clockspeed) go mostly unused.

Indoors (caves/underground) it's a little bit more even and the GPU gets a good workout (although I suspect that like Oblivion, underground has very poor occlusion/culling).

Those places where you see big constraints (eg, droppin down to 20-30fps), I tried a simple 10% Overclock on the CPU and saw a roughly equivalent (10%) increase in FPS, . Single GPU usage is only around 50% on my setup at those times.

So dual-core clockspeed might be the way to go, if you have turbo-modes, do what you have to get them enabled.

That being said, once some good tweak-guides come out we will probably be able to see exactly what the CPU heavy graphics options are, and tune those of them down, while upping the GPU ones.

There are a few mods already to try and up the GPU workload (shader based) and improve the visuals since it's pretty tricky with the default setup to do that at the moment.
 
There are software issues at work here. My 2500k and one 5870 can play on ultra with better FPS than that.
 
i get the same frame rates with a q9550 at 3.61 and a GTX 570 overclocked.
1920x1200

mines normal i would assume.. I just think its a combination of the crappy skyrim engine programing and the video drivers.
Maybe you should try running that cpu at to 4.4+
i also think this game is cpu limited, GTX 580 sli should be fine.. Your processor and possibly the vid drivers are a issue..
 
Skyrim is cool and all but it doesnt look that great for the amount of horsepower it takes to run this game. D3D9 sigh ....another friggin console port crap job.

I wasnt watching my CPU usage either but the game ran fine for me. No slowdowns or anything at any point.
 
davegl1234 said:
My full system:

i7 920 @ 3.8
580 SLI
6 GB corsair dominaotr RAM
p6td deluxe motherboard
Asus d2x sound card
corsair 1200 ax power supply
ocz vertex ssd hard drive
Click to expand...

Try taking your sound card out and see if that helps.
 
I disabled the sound card in device manager but it made no difference.

It is strange that people with near identical setups aren't having troubles, but then there are others in similar threads whom are...the game doesn't use more than 50% of my cpu (due to non existence scaling over more than 2 cores) but i'm hitting fps in the 20's just on the opening scene.
 
I think your performance isn't as out of whack with everyone else as you think. You are reporting minimum framerates (that opening scene certainly has it's rough spots), where everyone else is likely reporting there average and isn't paying attention to the minimums.

When this game hits a minimum framerate like that, it's usually a very CPU dependent part. Over at tweakguides.com the site owner is reporting similiar things. Check out these 3 screenshots to show how certain scenes are definitely CPU limited.

1280x720 1920x1080 1920x1200

I believe he has similar hardware. Things you can try: drop your CPU down to stock, see if that effects the framerate. Drop shadow detail down to low (that one seems very CPU heavy) and see if that changes your minimums.

I chalk it up to inefficiencies in the engine, and considering that at it's base, it's still the same foundation as the previous games, it is not surprising. If your framerate is always in the toilet, then that's a diff story, but if it runs great except for certain spots, where it tanks, then I think that's just the quirks of the engine.

I'm personally waiting for some detailed tweak guides to come out that investigate the perf impact of all the settings. To find those ones that will hopefully reduce the CPU workload at minimal performance loss. I do not have quite the beefy CPU you have, so I'm seeing minimums dropping into the low 20s / high teens. And that's only at 1680x1050.

In this game, half your quad core sits idle, and often half your single GPU (let alone SLI). If you wanted to balance SLI 580s, I'm not sure a CPU exists to give Skyrim (Gamebyro/Creation) a balanced workload.
 
Thats why i am keeping my Q9550 at 3.61 and my GTX 570 overclocked until IVY and new GPUs are released. Then by then drivers would of matured for this game as well as the with new video cards i am sure TBA in the spring running a IVY and SLI will slam this game.

I can play 99 percent of the games out now at 60 FPS at 1920x1200
core i7 is over rated
I would say its great to have a 2500k or 2600k with SLI with a pair of 580s or a 6990.
I dont need to run 3 game monitors to run something like 2500x whatever

i can run skyrim at no FSAA at 60FPS with no dips, on high

on ultra max settings and 4X or 2 X FSAA i get dips between 35-60fps and the carriage scene was bad. Think i saw 25FPS lowest. but if i did no FSAA i saw dips into the 40s on the carriage scene. Game is very playable for me.. Metro 2033 was worse. 2 percent of the games out there give me issues.
 
UnrealCpu said:
Thats why i am keeping my Q9550 at 3.61 and my GTX 570 overclocked until IVY and new GPUs are released. Then by then drivers would of matured for this game as well as the with new video cards i am sure TBA in the spring running a IVY and SLI will slam this game.

I can play 99 percent of the games out now at 60 FPS at 1920x1200
core i7 is over rated
I would say its great to have a 2500k or 2600k with SLI with a pair of 580s or a 6990.
I dont need to run 3 game monitors to run something like 2500x whatever

i can run skyrim at no FSAA at 60FPS with no dips, on high

on ultra max settings and 4X or 2 X FSAA i get dips between 35-60fps and the carriage scene was bad. Think i saw 25FPS lowest. but if i did no FSAA i saw dips into the 40s on the carriage scene. Game is very playable for me.. Metro 2033 was worse. 2 percent of the games out there give me issues.
Click to expand...

Thats because Skyrim is a DX9 console crap port. Great game, decent graphics, shitty port once again and guess what! It apparently doesnt take a lot of power to run D3D9 like 10 and 11. So yeah at single screen resolution you are going to push the game well.
 
tangoseal said:
Thats because Skyrim is a DX9 console crap port. Great game, decent graphics, shitty port once again and guess what! It apparently doesnt take a lot of power to run D3D9 like 10 and 11. So yeah at single screen resolution you are going to push the game well.
Click to expand...

im not impressed by this game at all either.
i mean they had 6 years to make a good single player RPG and gave us crap.. Oblivion is so much better.. I just like the interface in that game , the music, acting , etc... The high res texture packs which i will be testing out today for oblivion will probably make the game more enjoyable. Skyrim is alright but should be alot greater to make me want to upgrade my cpu. btw i the acting is horrible.. i have better memories playing Dagger Fall when that first came out.. That was the ultimate RPG back in the day. Skyrim is a failure, programming sucks, acting , gameplay is alright, character development is awful to look at i.e. stats...

maybe i am just getting older idk.. all my years of gamming 27 years i see that consoles are holding PC gamers back.. Games should be developed solely for PC not consoles and then ported over. S
thats why everyone plays Wow and forsaken world for a RPG , the interface and gameplay is made for a PC. Graphics arent everything to me either. Forsaken Wold which is free is a very good multiplayer RPG like Wow with old school PC graphics but is fun and addictive. I could care less about killing a dragon hhahahaha.
 
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Has anybody looked into the .ini file for Skyrim yet? If I remember correctly, there was one or more settings in the Oblivion .ini file that allowed for more threading than what was there by default.

If Skyrim has similiar setting(s), that could make it run better.

I don't have Skyrim yet so I can't really look into it.
 
I don't think this game is cpu dependent at all. I keep up task manager, catalyst control center and asus ai suite for monitoring load and temps, and with everything maxed, including 8x msaa and fsaa turned on, the cpu stays at about 15% on four of the cores and ignores the hyperthreaded cores completely. The GPU maxes out most of the time unless I'm inside small areas like caves or buildings, and it then drops to 65% roughly. I don't have a sound card installed either...
 
The game can be very CPU dependent. Look at the benchmarks at THG and computerbase.de
At times, it even scales 1:1 clockwise with a 4,5 GHz 2600K. Uses only 2 threads/cores however, so clock speed is everything.

SLI only works with the latest beta driver (285.79), as it brings a SLI profile that older drivers don't have.
 
cyclone3d said:
Has anybody looked into the .ini file for Skyrim yet? If I remember correctly, there was one or more settings in the Oblivion .ini file that allowed for more threading than what was there by default.

If Skyrim has similiar setting(s), that could make it run better.

I don't have Skyrim yet so I can't really look into it.
Click to expand...

Hrmm if so this game is going to run STELLAR when I build my 3930K 6 core this weekend.
 
tangoseal said:
Hrmm if so this game is going to run STELLAR when I build my 3930K 6 core this weekend.
Click to expand...

actually it wont make a difference , you are better off buying a i2500k overclocking it to 4.5+ and buying two 6990s in SLI hahaha. Or just go with GTX 580s in SLI
 
Here is what my task manager and temps look like with everything maxed, including 8x msaa and fsaa turned on. I don't have fraps, but the frames are fine, no chop or lag. I had to turn on windowed mode to make it easier to take the shot, and I also ran around and quested for a bit before shooting the pic. This thing hardly hits the cpu, but the video card stays pretty well maxed out in outdoor environs.

 
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