# How can I get rid of micro-stutter in Skyrim?



## Black Panther (Jan 31, 2012)

Ever since the game was patched to 1.4 I get awesome fps, maxed at 60 indoors, in dungeons and in a significant portion of the outdoors. In the cities it's ~50 or ~55.

But this 'improvement' brought a problem for me: micro-stuttering.

It's like this (game is not skyrim in this case):










Any ideas on how I can solve this?

I tried the fps limiter I found on skyrimnexus but it gave me screen-tearing (even though I made sure I had vsync enabled in CCC) and it was worse than the micro-stutter.


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## entropy13 (Jan 31, 2012)

Stop playing Skyrim and the micro-stuttering would be gone. 




Maybe it's finally the CPU that's bottlenecking?


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## Dice (Jan 31, 2012)

I found (single card) i need to run windowed with the borderless window mod. Makes it much smoother for me. Dont know nuffink about crossfire tho..


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## Black Panther (Jan 31, 2012)

entropy13 said:


> Maybe it's finally the CPU that's bottlenecking?



Don't think so. My fps remain a constant 60 during the micro-stuttering. I get perfectly smooth gameplay when the fps get lower than 60.



Dice said:


> I found (single card) i need to run windowed with the borderless window mod. Makes it much smoother for me. Dont know nuffink about crossfire tho..



I saw screenshots of that, and it seems that you still have the taskbar showing in the game? If not, I'll definitely try it.


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## Dice (Jan 31, 2012)

Na taskbar disapears after a bit, by the time the save has loaded.


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## Black Panther (Jan 31, 2012)

Thanks! Using the borderless window fixed the microstuttering


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## yogurt_21 (Jan 31, 2012)

a little off topic, but there's micro stutter in both examples in that video, the first config is simply more obvious with it, it does still exist in the second.


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## Black Panther (Jan 31, 2012)

Even more off-topic, is micro stutter a specific 'illness' (lol) of AMD crossfire?


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## robal (Jan 31, 2012)

Black Panther said:


> Thanks! Using the borderless window fixed the microstuttering



Well, it didn't "fix" it.
Crossfire doesn't work in windowed mode, so by using borderless window, you play on single GPU.


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## Wrigleyvillain (Jan 31, 2012)

Black Panther said:


> Even more off-topic, is micro stutter a specific 'illness' (lol) of AMD crossfire?



No it's inherent to multi-gpu not crossfire only but it's one of those wierd things that not all get or notice and the causes and solutions seem to be really hard to pin down. For example, I have never noticed it myself though I have only had single cards except for my present setup and 4850 CFX.

Now that I think about it a bell is being rung about the single PCB Crossfire cards having it "worse" but I may be mistaken. Gonna have to Google.

I know you are  "slow to upgrade" but I definitely would have dumped the dual core and this 5990 since all these Skyrim problems (as it's about time anyway horsepower-wise esp at your high res). But that's me...


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## WhiteNoise (Jan 31, 2012)

I've been dealing with 'micro stuttering' since the game released. It happens often but I'm so used to it that I don't care any longer. There are several fixes online other than shutting down one GPU.


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## Wrigleyvillain (Jan 31, 2012)

None here, as I said. In any title. It's "one of those things".


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## EastCoasthandle (Jan 31, 2012)

Disabling core parking have helped some people remove stuttering in general.  But if the Resource Monitor's CPU tab shows 100% Max. Frequency you should be getting 100% of the CPU.


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## cadaveca (Jan 31, 2012)

Black Panther said:


> Even more off-topic, is micro stutter a specific 'illness' (lol) of AMD crossfire?



No. There are several causes for the behavior. One very obvious one is that sometimes although FPS reporting may SAY 60FPS...it's not actually displaying all 60 frames.

Sometimes..it's CPU.

Sometimes, it's memory.

Sometimes, it's PCIe link states.

Sometimes, It's Crossfire not showing all the frames that are rendered(SLI gets this as well)

Sometimes, it's just a bunk driver.

Sometimes, it's the app itself.


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## JrRacinFan (Jan 31, 2012)

Black Panther said:


> Thanks! Using the borderless window fixed the microstuttering



Are you sure Windowed mode gives you crossfire/SLI though?


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## Black Panther (Jan 31, 2012)

JrRacinFan said:


> Are you sure Windowed mode gives you crossfire/SLI though?



No, I can't get AfterBurner to show while running in windowed mode


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## douglatins (Jan 31, 2012)

I dont think you can, micro comes from crossfire and sometimes sli, your card is native crossfire...
you could disable one card, but i dunno how


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## Batou1986 (Jan 31, 2012)

I notice micro stutter on my setup when im @60 fps as well its almost like the new patch made it run too good.
Time to crank on AA and AF from CCC 



EastCoasthandle said:


> Disabling core parking have helped some people remove stuttering in general.  But if the Resource Monitor's CPU tab shows 100% Max. Frequency you should be getting 100% of the CPU.


Is there any downside to doing this aside from power consumption.


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## Black Panther (Jan 31, 2012)

douglatins said:


> I dont think you can, micro comes from crossfire and sometimes sli, your card is native crossfire...
> you could disable one card, but i dunno how



I can but it's not worth the trouble. 

Running the game through RadeonPro would enable me to choose between CF and single GPU (and muck up most of the game's graphics by getting all menus strobing between normal and bright green... and make fire in the game appear like large black building-blocks... 

I wouldn't want to do that again. The last time I tried RadeonPro to get better fps, last year I had to reinstall the game anew because uninstalling both RadeonPro and graphics driver didn't work.


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## yogurt_21 (Jan 31, 2012)

microstuttering is present in single gpu configurations as well as multiple gpu configs. 

it's just more obvious/viewable in multi cards. 

It's not noticible to me on my 480 sli in any game I play, however I know it's there and the variation is too small to be noticible. 

When it becomes more viewable it's almost always the game or the drivers imo.

being that BP has already run the guantlet of drivers and patches/fixes, It may just be  a bad gpu/game combination.

When you look at W1zz's latest reviews, the 5970 is still an super powerful gpu solution...except for in skyrim.













*versus*


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## JrRacinFan (Jan 31, 2012)

Black Panther said:


> No, I can't get AfterBurner to show while running in windowed mode



Try GPUz and report max usage?


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## Wrigleyvillain (Jan 31, 2012)

yogurt_21 said:


> being that BP has already run the guantlet of drivers and patches/fixes, It may just be  a bad gpu/game combination.



Yeah as I've suspected for awhile now. While it's hardly a simple "fix" as I've said I would have already sold this card. It's still worth a decent chunk of change too.

Now that I think about it I'm not sure if anyone has asked when the last time Windows was reinstalled either, though...


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## yogurt_21 (Jan 31, 2012)

Wrigleyvillain said:


> Yeah as I've suspected for awhile now. While it's hardly a simple "fix" as I've said I would have already sold this card. It's still worth a decent chunk of change too.
> 
> Now that I think about it I'm not sure if anyone has asked when the last time Windows was reinstalled either, though...



too true, when I look at out at the market I could easily see doing a cost for cost swap for a 6970, which would give her  a better gaming experience in skyrim. 

The question would then be would making skyrim playable merit a 20% overall performance drop for other games? (stock to stock comparison)


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## Black Panther (Jan 31, 2012)

JrRacinFan said:


> Try GPUz and report max usage?



Can't either.


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## EastCoasthandle (Jan 31, 2012)

Batou1986 said:


> Is there any downside to doing this aside from power consumption.



From what I've read it's more for laptops, etc.  For a desktop PC I don't know of any downsides to disabling core parking.  The benefits however, will generally depend on what you are doing.  If you decide to turn it off use winrar's benchmark program (tools > benchmark ha& hardware test) with core parking and without core parking to see if you notice any improvement.  That should give you some idea if it's worth while.  

There are a few ways of doing this.  The easiest and safest is this method.


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## xenocide (Feb 1, 2012)

Usually it's Multi-GPU setups or HyperThreading.  Varies from game to game.


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