So as my title says, I'm having lag spikes when playing Skyrim. They seem to occur when I exit a building into the open world/city.
I don't have any graphics mods installed and I don't believe anything running in the background could be causing it. (Avast! Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, VMWare (no Operating systems are on) and Rainmeter.)
This also will sometimes happen when playing Saints Row The Third.
When the lag spike occurs the GPU usage suddenly jumps between 100% - 99% and the frame rate will hang around 10-15.
CPU usage sits around 60% and only 3GB of all 8GB of RAM is being used.
This used to happen on my GTX 460, but I figured that was because it was a old card from two generations back. Apparently it seems to be a problem with the game though.
Would anyone have any insight on why this happens, or is this actually normal?
It's very annoying having to reset the game when sitting back on my couch.
GTX 680
i5 3570k
8GB RAM
1920 x 1080 resolution.
Graphics settings on ultra.
310.70 Graphics Driver.