I don't know about a comprehensive guide, but I have a few suggestions.
First, as background, every setting is going to be geared towards balancing two different (and diametrically opposed) optimizations--that of speed in calculation, and size in memory. For instance, your texture quality, and to a lesser extent, model quality, will have a large memory usage with relatively minimal processing imprints, whereas your physics, shadows, and reflections will be rough on the CPU/GPU but in some cases have absolutely microscopic memory footprint. I'll call this Speed vs Size.
Your Size-heavy settings are going to increase load times between levels and eat up RAM, which would slow down other processes, but we'll assume you're running SC2 by itself. Your Speed-heavy settings are going to affect your FPS the most, and also have the most wow-factor.
So with that in mind, whenever I have to turn my graphics down because I'm playing tug-of-war (I usually run on Extreme:D ) I default everything to medium and then turn texture quality to high, shaders to high, reflections off, particle effects to low, physics to low, and Model Detail to high. If you hover your mouse over each option it will detail out what it does, and you can usually tell whether it will be more of a Speed sacrifice or a Size sacrifice, and if it's not clear-cut it's a mix of the two.
I did a test to show the difference, this is a shot of a replay on ultra, and this is a shot with the above settings. I started the match with about 80 fps on ultra and about 130 on the frugal settings, and around this point (tons of marauders, roaches, marines, and carriers) I was running around 40-50 on ultra and around 60-70 on frugal. As you can see, there's not a whole lot of difference in the stills, but it was noticeable enough--you can see the lack of motion trails on the interceptors, for example, and some of the explosions weren't as spectacular.
You shouldn't have a problem with that machine, but if you do, you can try these settings as a starting point, or try setting the various Speed settings even lower. You probably won't have to put the texture or model quality lower, as in general that will just affect load times and not so much the calculations.
As Serge Bekenkamp already mentioned, the shadows in Skyrim are processed by the CPU, and not the GPU. This is a game engine limitation. Lowering Skyrim's shadow settings will help lessen CPU load.
Other tips that could help CPU performance:
Try cleaning dust out of your PC. See these Super User posts about that:
Also, try the HiAlgoBoost mod. It claims to improve FPS by lowering system resource usage when the player character is in motion. It should help lighten the load for your CPU when playing Skyrim.
HiAlgoBoost dynamically modifies internal rendering resolution in order to increase frame rate, and utilizes various additional approaches to make the game more responsive and smoothly controllable. It does not affect game contents.
HiAlgoBoost features:
- Significantly improves responsiveness and gameplay experience.
- Significantly reduces in-game loading times.
- Increases framerate during character motion by momentarily reducing the resolution.
Best Answer
Try setting FPS caped inside borderlands. V-sync off, 60hz.
"Verify integrity of game cache" if running from Steam.
Run the Direct-X redistributable that came with it.
Run Physx redistributable or update.
Disable your sound card to rule that out.
Try your AMD video card.
Get a KVM switch or make a dual boot. How were you planing to play old x32 games anyway?
Have a look here: http://forums.gearboxsoftware.com/showthread.php?t=148479 for manually editing the display ini.
Takes a long time to start,eh? Anti-virus throttling you? Try putting Borderlands on a secondary hard drive or being disconnected from the internet (are auto updates killing you?). Device manager shows no conflicts or lack of drivers?