skyrim Skyrim Lag/Graphical Issues

[LightEco]

Hey Everyone,

So I already played a ton of Skyrim on Xbox when it came out, but recently I've been wanting to play it again. To gain the advantages that the PC version allows (faster loading, etc). I bought it on Steam and was initially surprised how well it ran. However, I seem to be getting odd issues recently. Most notably are the weird graphical artifacts that appear and the occasional lag. As for lag, the game runs nice and smooth 90% of the time, but sometimes it just grinds to halt for a second then returns to normal, like its loading something. This happens everywhere, but happens the most outside and in cities. I purposely installed Skyrim on my SSD to prevent this, but its still happening. The graphical artifacts are my main concern however, as now I'm getting flickering textures, giant panes of random colors, lines shooting out of people and such. It happens randomly, but seems to be most prevalent in the cities.

I haven't noticed these issues in any other game and I'm not running any mods besides the official high res texture pack, but these issues started occurring before I installed that anyway. Also, I'm running on the NVidia recommended specs which put it roughly between high and ultra. Any thoughts?

My computer specs:

i7-3820

8gb ram

120gb Intel SSD (Skyrim and Steam are both installed here, the rest of my steam library is on a secondary HDD)

2XGTX 555 in SLI (running latest drivers - 320.18)

Win 8

Thanks!

[PsychD]

I had the same problem running with a lot of texture mods, 2-8k, and a demanding ENB.

Try lowering the AA settings and find out what settings fit your rig.

[SinsOfCube]

Try disabling your SLI, Skyrim has quite a few issues with dual gpu setups. I had quite a few issues when I played Skyrim on my CrossFireX build, they were all solved when I disabled it.

[LightEco]

Oddly enough I actually removed it from my SSD and installed it to a HDD secondary drive and the game got better.

[McKay]

Skyrim for me runs at a solid 40-60FPS yet sometimes it stutters for a microsecond when running about, its odd.

[123456789A]

I'd try to avoid the SLI stuff. I got it running on one GTX Titan and it runs smooth all the time (also using Intel SSD 240GB where the game is installed). If I try to SLI in Skyrim, sometimes I get a clash of the titans resulting in temporary dips in framerate.