Nvidia 550ti stuttering bad
 

Folks, my hdd died and so I lost my Skyrim settings on the new system. Before the crash, Skyrim ran very smoothly with tons of graphic mods. Since I've reinstalled, I get terrible lag, especially in interiors. I know this game is extremely picky about the settings, so if anyone has a similar card, can you post your ini's and tweaks? Everytime I install ENBoost the game just CTDs, so I removed that.

So far I have pure water, pure weather, all the DLC and unofficial patches, and Vilja. I had all of these mods -pure weather before the HDD crash with nary a problem. I've disabled pure weather and the lag doesn't go away. I'm at work or I'd post my settings for you folks to look over. I can do that tonight.

A big part of the problem is that there are hundreds of tweak suggestions and they contradict one another. I haven't found anything that works. I am using the 321 drivers from Nvidia. They have the least amount of lag of the recently released sets.

Does it stutter intermittently or do you get consistently low fps? In any case, if you're having issues indoors specifically, it might be a lighting/shadow issue; try lowering the respective quality settings.

I'm not sure if it's fps, Drithius. What happens is, if I'm in an interior and I turn a 360, I'll spin 180 at normal and then 90 at about a comatose snail's pace and the final 90 at normal again. This is much worse with lighting, so shadow might be my big culprit, but I had them maxed on the older, slower hdd. Everything else is the same. I think I've botched either my Nvidia contol panel, skrim.ini, skyprefs.ini but I've deleted and gone vanilla on those, to no avail. I've tried 3 sets of drivers and the 321 series seems to be the best. I wonder if it could be the driver still. Anyway, I'll kill shadows to eliminate that piece of the pie, thanks!

I am running a few memory tweaks that I know I didn't have the first time, but I don't remember what I've added. I did do a full backup of the 3 skyrim directories just after installing the game and SKSE. If all else fails, I'll go back to those and start from fresh loading one mod at a time and paying attention. I did clean the DLC's with TES5edit.

I agree. If I have performance issues (video game related) I put all the settings in the dirt and then ramp them up to find the culprit. For example with my last card I found a huge difference between different Ambient Occlusion settings in Skyrim. Low quality had almost no frame rate hit and high made it unplayable.

I have it turned off completely, as I remember it was a problem child in my first run of the game.

On a GeForce GTX 550 ti? That's very surprising.

Well, the graphics mods weren't as robust as they are today. I've removed a couple of the more onerous mods and the game is getting better. I may just go buy a GTX 760 this weekend and add em back in. I have to make sure the architecture works though.
I'm not sure if a GTX 760 and GTX 550 ti use the same card slot on the mobo. I think my PSU is 700 watts, so that should be okay, but I wonder about cooling. I just have a stock cooler.