tutorial missions=high textures, no probs.
riverwood= high textures no probs.
bleak *thingy name*= if i'm on the same gameplay no probs, if i close and return another day to play have to reduce to medium.
after bleak *thingy name*=medium or lag.
after a while in medium= low or lag
after a while in low= start removing everything!
it does come and go, for example: if i load my savegame and i'm in a fortress/cave/inside area, it's considerably more laggy, but as soon as i exit it gets less laggy.
viceversa, if i load the savegame and i'm outside, it's sluggish until i enter and exit a place.
:/
but the first character reached level 24 with seemingly no problems at all keeping high textures and no lags.
it's a recent thing with the second character...and i can't explain it at all.
That's weird how it's worse in your second playthrough, and differs if you jump in and out of buildings.
Disregarding the thing with buildings for a minute, did you mess with the AA/AF settings, or turn on FXAA, or change the view distances or anything like that? A lot of people were saying that FXAA improved their framerate or made it more even, but for me it makes it almost universally worse - it's consistantly around 40 or 45 if I use it, but that's worse than what I get with 4x AA and 4x AF (45-60 FPS, normally 50-60). But I'm using an (EVGA) NVidia GTX 460 1 GB, which is better than what you have.
(I have the shadows on high, as raising them to ultra just makes the framerate worse for no real benefit.)
Thinking about the framerate differing when you go in and out of buildings and such, I'd wonder if you were running out of memory, except that there's no way you're using up all 1 GB of video memory (I don't even come close, and I'm running it on high, aside from radial blur being on medium), and if you were running out of system RAM Skyrim would just crash silently to the desktop :V. I applied the large address aware patch to fix that on mine (since it was actually crashing on me once per day or so), but some people have reported that it made their game slower or something. I didn't notice any slowdown or lower framerates myself, but I'm running it in 64-bit windows 8 just for fun.
6 7 new replies while I was typing this? Mein gott in himmel!