Skyrim & Quadcores

ok so ive been modding my skyrim to hell. its using a peak of 3000MB of VRAM so it is pretty heavily modded. my issue comes in with my CPU. occasionally i see my gpu usage drop to 80-90% instead of 99% because my CPU is at 100% but only on 1 core. The other 3 cores and 4 threads are idle at 0-1% usage.

does anyone know how to improve Skyrim with multi core performance?

I run skyrim fine on my current quad core though there's some unoffical fixes that are suppose to improve performance use them myself even though I could run the game fine already.


Skyrim Project Optimization at Skyrim Nexus - mods and community

Quote on what it does from the mod page on nexus.

HOW IT WORKS

I used a feature called Occlusion Culling, where i manually put occlusion planes in some spots of the interiors to improve performance.
What these occlusion planes do is unrender parts of the cell/objects/NPCs that are not being seen by the player, in most cases behind a wall or above/below floors (occluded).

Why make your hardware render things when they are not being seen, right?!

Occlusion Culling is an old technique used in lots of games including Skyrim, so dont worry about any damage to your hardware because what it does is the opposite:

If less things are being draw on-screen at the same time, it means your hardware is using less processing power to achieve the same thing, and it automatically converts in better performance.

Yea for more info read about it on mod webpage, there's a download link and some screen shots there. Suppose to slightly improve performance and I haven't noticed any graphical difference. I use a good amount of graphic mods on and still get good performance. I would check that you don't have something in the background hogging up the cpu processes just in case as well. The rig in your specs shouldn't really be having issues. Really odd that it's only utilizing one core.


Also found a webpage talking about some ini tweaks on making skyrim use more cores better.

If you have a PC with more than one CPU you can enable a few settings to make use of those additional CPU cores a get a significant speed boost in game.

source: http://itcprosolutions.com/skyrimguides/tweak_guide.htm

Changes need to be made to both Skyrim.ini and SkyrimPrefs.ini to make Skyrim aware of your better PC.

In Skyrim.ini Add/Edit:

[BackgroundLoad]
bBackgroundLoadLipFiles=1
bLoadBackgroundFaceGen=1
bUseMultiThreadedFaceGen=1
bBackgroundCellLoads=1
bLoadHelmetsInBackground=1
bUseMultiThreadedTrees=1
bUseBackgroundFileLoader=1
[Animation]
bMultiThreadBoneUpdate=1
[HAVOK]
iNumThreads=XX
[General]
bUseThreadedTempEffects=1
bUseThreadedParticleSystem=1
bMultiThreadMovement=1
bUseThreadedMorpher=1
[Decals]
bDecalMultithreaded=1

In SkyrimPrefs.ini Add/Edit:

[Navmesh]
bUseThreadedMeshes=1
[Trees]
bUseMultiThreadedTrees=1
bShadowMaskZPrePass=1
[BackgroundLoad]
bBackgroundLoadLipFiles=1
bLoadBackgroundFaceGen=1
bUseMultiThreadedFaceGen=1
bBackgroundCellLoads=1
bLoadHelmetsInBackground=1
bUseMultiThreadedTrees=1
[General]
bUseThreadedParticleSystem=1
bUseThreadedBlood=1
bUseThreadedMorpher=1
bUseThreadedTempEffects=1
bUseThreadedTextures=1
bUseThreadedMeshes=1
bUseThreadedLOD=1
bUseThreadedAI=1
bUseThreadedMorpher=1
[Decals]
bDecalMultithreaded=1

For "iNumThreads" set this to the number of CPU cores your PC has. If you have 4 or more leave this as 5 (maximum).

Blood

ive tried the INI settings, but it didnt work

my one CPU core is still at 90% while the others are at 0-1% lol unless its trying to use the hyper threaded core on core 0?

EDIT:

Nope only thge first core is being used.

Weird, try disabling hyper threading maybe and see what happens. Don't know if it will do anything if not just turn it back on. Though i've heard it can cause issues at times. Also if you have mods try starting the game without them and see if the problem persist. Also verify cache for the game through the steam options by right clicking in the client on the game then going to properties should be on like the 2nd tab.

I can't remember if you can alt tab out of skyrim or not but if you can, go to task manager > processes > right click skyrim.exe and set affinity to all cores.