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Skyrim PC Frame Rate V-Sync Mouse Movement
Nov 20, 2011PC GamingComments (0)
After patch 1.3, this is no longer an issue. If you haven't yet, turn off V-Sync to reduce mouse lag!

Skyrim has an odd "feature" that causes vertical mouse acceleration to be tied to the current frame rate. This means that in areas of low frame rate (busy city areas), the vertical mouse movement will be lower and out of sync with the horizontal mouse movement. In areas of high frame rate (and with V-Sync off), it will be the opposite.

V-sync should keep the horizontal and vertical movements in sync as long as your frame rate stays not too far below 60. If your frame rate does drop below 60 by enough, you may experience slower vertical mouse movement. If you turn V-Sync off, you'll probably notice in caves and other confined areas that vertical mouse movement feels much more sensitive. Staring at a wall exacerbates this.

I hope Bethesda has a fix for this in the forthcoming patch, because right now there isn't a whole lot you can do. Turning V-Sync off really improves mouse responsiveness for me, but I can't play with it due to the high frame rates in caves. I've read about changing the fMouseHeadingYScale and fMouseHeadingXScale variables to match each other. In my experience it just changes where the vertical mouse movement syncs up, but still leaves it off if the frame rate is different than where they sync. I also tried D3D Overrider to force V-Sync, while having it set to off in the Skyrim ini. Unfortunately this introduces the same mouse lag that Skyrim's normal V-Sync does. So for now I prefer to just leave Skyrim V-Sync on and deal with the occasional slow vertical mouse movement in busy city areas.
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