Really this goes for any game, but for my current needs, how do I measure my Frames per Second in Skyrim?
If possible I would like to avoid installing any additional software.
How to find the frame rate (in FPS) in Skyrim
the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim
Related Solutions
Look in your menu->magic->active. Hover over each item, and you will see in the description of the effect what gave you that, and it will say 'blessing of talos'.
Skyrim's heightmap is rectangular and uses 119 x 94 = 11186 in-game "cells". The engine uses the same cell size as in Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas - 57.6 metres (63 yards) to the side, 3317.76 m² (3 969 square yards) of area. The full map thus has an area of about 37.1 km² (14.3 square miles). Around a quarter of this is not playable, stuck behind invisible borders.
The playable area is roughly the same as the one in Morrowind and Oblivion and less than one thousandths of Daggerfall's size.
In addition, the game features a good part of the surrounding area of Tamriel as low-quality "fake" terrain meshes.
For comparison, the heightmaps of Skyrim (upper left corner), Morrowind (upper right corner) and Oblivion (lower left corner) look as follows, to scale (courtesy of Lightwave from Bethesda's forums).
Most of Oblivion's heightmap is not playable, while most of Skyrim's and all of Morrowind's map can be visited in game.
Best Answer
Unfortunately, Skyrim does not provide a method for displaying its FPS to the player. The console command
tdt(ToggleDebugText) was expected to work by many players, as it did in previous Bethesda games. It doesn't work in Skyrim, though, so third-party software really is your only choice in this case.I've used FRAPS successfully with Skyrim, the free version is sufficient for just an FPS readout.
In general, if a game or its engine doesn't specifically provide an implementation of an FPS readout (usually via some sort of console command or similar), then additional software is your only choice.