The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim PC Performance discussion

Ambient Occlusion looks GOOOD (Fallout 3 mode, Performance), but goddamn does it take a toll on framerate... made it go under 60 fps IN A CAVE which never happened before (GTX 560Ti, i5 2500k). Yeah I think I'll live without it.
 
Ambient Occlusion looks GOOOD (Fallout 3 mode, Performance), but goddamn does it take a toll on framerate... made it go under 60 fps IN A CAVE which never happened before (GTX 560Ti, i5 2500k). Yeah I think I'll live without it.

That's odd. I have an i7 920 and a GTX 470 and I put those same settings on, no framerate drop whatsoever.
 
seems like a minor improvement :/

When you combine all his mods together the improvement is quite significant (at high resolutions). All we need now is high-res armour textures and we'll be all good for avatars and companions.

Ambient Occlusion looks GOOOD (Fallout 3 mode, Performance), but goddamn does it take a toll on framerate... made it go under 60 fps IN A CAVE which never happened before (GTX 560Ti, i5 2500k). Yeah I think I'll live without it.

What AA, AF, tweaks and mods are you using? With everything at stock you should be fine...
 
When you combine all his mods together the improvement is quite significant (at high resolutions). All we need now is high-res armour textures and we'll be all good for avatars and companions.



What AA, AF, tweaks and mods are you using? With everything at stock you should be fine...

AA 8x, AF 16x, shadows on trees/rocks, 1080p, Ultra settings except shadows on high.
 
AA 8x, AF 16x, shadows on trees/rocks, 1080p, Ultra settings except shadows on high.

That explains it then, you're about on the cusp of what the 560 Ti can handle. If Bethesda can optimize the shadows and some other stuff you may gain enough spare perf, or you could try and OC your CPU/GPU.
 
Yes to everything, works fine (better than KB&M in my opinion) and vibration is solid, probably exactly the same as the 360 version.

As a long time PC gamer I cringe when I see a comment like this. I can understand that someone would be accustomed to using a controller when playing an FPS, but the notion that it is somehow better than KB/M, even as an opinion, is such an alien concept to me. The inefficiency of thumbing frantically trying to line up a shot on a flying dragon would drive me nuts. With a KB/M I'd have killed it, looted the remains and sauntered off with it's soul in the time it would take me to get that one shot off with the controller. Trying to play an FPS with a controller always feels gimped to me.
 
The game plays just fine on gamepad. But it is confusing to me why people keep insisting it plays better on gamepad. They seem to think the menus is what makes this the case, because they were designed for the gamepad. While this is true, except for character creation the menu works just fine for kb/m. You can use wasd as your joystick, tab and e as your a and b buttons. All that functionality is identical.

And then on top of that you can use the scrollwheel if your mouse is in the window and you can use the mouse to select things rapidly rather than having to go through them slowly to get to your selection. And you can go directly to the submenus with shortcut keys rather then having to go through the first level submenu, then choosing map/magic/items/skills. It comes prebuilt with 1-8 hotkeys and quicksave/quickload although I understand you can add this to the gamepad with a mod.

And of course pointing at stuff is always better with a mouse.

I do agree with the argument that this game is best played on a big TV with surround sound, and often that is a couch for most people, and a gamepad is definitely more comfortable on a couch. And analogue movement is a nice feature of the gamepad I wish kb/m replicated.

I think it's great that the game supports both control methods so well though so that we have options!
 
It's better ergonomically and for comfort, that's way more important to me than hitting a dragon in the air perfectly.

I actually can't hit a flying dragon even with m/kb amusingly enough. I just can't figure out how to lead things with bow and arrow. It's a bit easier with destruction spells.
 
Control method elitism is just what this thread needed.

Relax Princess. I clearly stated that I understand that it's a simple preference for some people to play with a controller. I reject the contention that it's objectively better, but agree that opinions will differ on the subject.
 
It's better ergonomically and for comfort, that's way more important to me than hitting a dragon in the air perfectly.

I was referring to performance, accuracy and efficiency. I thought the context was fairly obvious. I'd also point out that I'm quite comfortable playing with a KB/M. In any case, it's time for me to stop the derail and move on.
 
Hey guys, got a question.

My PC rig is not as good as I remembered (lol...). I just checked and while it works great for my job (3D modeling), I think for gaming it's already quite old.

Intel Core 2 Quad. CPU Q9450 @ 2.66GHz
RAM 4GB
GeForce 9600 GT

Running on Windows 7 64-bit. Do you guys think I'd be able to run the game with at least the same visual quality as PS3 and 360? (which I know isn't the best out there, anyway).

Also, if I plug a 360 controller would I be able to play with it?

I plan on updating my PC around February of next year, and making a fairly powerful workstation for 3D modeling so it should be able to run the game quite well by then, but until then it won't be the best thing out there I guess... :P
 
I was referring to performance, accuracy and efficiency. I thought the context was fairly obvious. I'd also point out that I'm quite comfortable playing with a KB/M. In any case, it's time for me to stop the derail and move on.

Well maybe the person you originally quoted wasn't referring to performance, accuracy or efficiency. Both control methods have their pros and cons, so we don't need to look down on others for preferring one over the other.
 
Hey guys, got a question.

My PC rig is not as good as I remembered (lol...). I just checked and while it works great for my job (3D modeling), I think for gaming it's already quite old.

Intel Core 2 Quad. CPU Q9450 @ 2.66GHz
RAM 4GB
GeForce 9600 GT

Running on Windows 7 64-bit. Do you guys think I'd be able to run the game with at least the same visual quality as PS3 and 360? (which I know isn't the best out there, anyway).

Also, if I plug a 360 controller would I be able to play with it?

I plan on updating my PC around February of next year, and making a fairly powerful workstation for 3D modeling so it should be able to run the game quite well by then, but until then it won't be the best thing out there I guess... :P
Someone else can confirm this but I think you can run it nicely. Not maxed out but on the same level as consoles.
 
As a long time PC gamer I cringe when I see a comment like this. I can understand that someone would be accustomed to using a controller when playing an FPS, but the notion that it is somehow better than KB/M, even as an opinion, is such an alien concept to me. The inefficiency of thumbing frantically trying to line up a shot on a flying dragon would drive me nuts. With a KB/M I'd have killed it, looted the remains and sauntered off with it's soul in the time it would take me to get that one shot off with the controller. Trying to play an FPS with a controller always feels gimped to me.

I'm the exact opposite. I can't hit shit in any kind of FPS when I play with kb+m. My accuracy in bad company 2 is actually 5% lower than what it was on 360. After an hour of getting used to using a bow in this game I was able to headshot people like crazy with a pad but I miss horribly on the mouse.

It comes down to experience. I've played 22 years with some form of a pad, and around 12-15 with the "dualshock" type pad (meaning the 2 sticks, shoulders and all that stuff which the 360 pad copies). At this point that controller is basically another hand to me.
 
Hey guys, got a question.

My PC rig is not as good as I remembered (lol...). I just checked and while it works great for my job (3D modeling), I think for gaming it's already quite old.

Intel Core 2 Quad. CPU Q9450 @ 2.66GHz
RAM 4GB
GeForce 9600 GT

Running on Windows 7 64-bit. Do you guys think I'd be able to run the game with at least the same visual quality as PS3 and 360? (which I know isn't the best out there, anyway).

Also, if I plug a 360 controller would I be able to play with it?

I plan on updating my PC around February of next year, and making a fairly powerful workstation for 3D modeling so it should be able to run the game quite well by then, but until then it won't be the best thing out there I guess... :P

Same GPU as you, 4gb ram, and a C2D. I can share my .ini files for you to start off with when you get the game. I've tweaked it to run as good looking as I can get it without going below 30 much at all. Looks better than consoles. I sacrifice shadows for performance because I don't care how accurate they are as long as they are there.

360 controller works perfectly and the menus adapt to it.
 
Just got to Whiterun. Performance keeps impressing me. I think it runs better than Oblivion, and looks quite a bit better to boot. Perhaps not as clean without much AA on my rig but definitely better with all the atmospheric effects going depending on the area and the new lighting. It rarely dips below 30 fps and there's very occasional quick stuttering, whereas Oblivion had almost constant hitching whenever walking around outdoor. I even bumped shadows to high and AA to 4x and it didn't affect it seemingly at all. Any idea if this will continue or if the game struggles later with large scale battles or more complex cities or whatever? I don't want this to be another The Witcher 2 case where performance at first seemed great but every new area worsened and by the time I reached that one city the game was slowing to a crawl with reduced settings...
 
Same GPU as you, 4gb ram, and a C2D. I can share my .ini files for you to start off with when you get the game. I've tweaked it to run as good looking as I can get it without going below 30 much at all. Looks better than consoles. I sacrifice shadows for performance because I don't care how accurate they are as long as they are there.

360 controller works perfectly and the menus adapt to it.

Sounds great. I'm having Wallach buy the game for me from the US Steam store because the JP store doesn't have the game available :( If he replies soon, I will do all the transactions today and hopefully be downloading the game in about an hour or so, dunno.

If you can, send me the ini file via email (my nickname @gmail). You can also add me via Steam, my nickname over there is the same as here.
 
So the Mods I've installed are starting to make this game look EASILY TWICE AS GOOD as vanilla...

fxaa injector preset 4
HD skyrim
flora,
water
sunbeams
faces
etc...

wow....
 
Just got to Whiterun. Performance keeps impressing me. I think it runs better than Oblivion, and looks quite a bit better to boot.
Yeah, I said that from the start. When the game works as intended (which it seems to do on your system and mine) it looks much better and runs much smoother than Oblivion, with fewer weird performance idiosyncrasies.
Any idea if this will continue or if the game struggles later with large scale battles or more complex cities or whatever?
In some cities the framerate drops a bit, especially when you're looking at it from an angle where you see the whole city.

Regarding the mouse/kb vs controller argument, preferences and comfort are obviously subjective, but I don't think it's wrong to state that a mouse is an objectively superior control method for first person games purely in terms of performance.
 
So, what are the top, simple, absolute must have tweaks that are crappy rig friendly yet make an obvious difference?

I think I'll do that tree self shadowing one from the Nvidia page to start with. And I guess uGrids?
 
So, what are the top, simple, absolute must have tweaks that are crappy rig friendly yet make an obvious difference?

I think I'll do that tree self shadowing one from the Nvidia page to start with.
The 2 self shadowing ones absolutely should be the starting point, they make a large difference with minimal impact.

Ugrids is a relatively small visual difference in many cases, but with a large performance hit (particularly beyond 7), so I'd refrain from that on a "crappy" rig.

Had to turn off SSAO again. Looks great in screenshots but whenever you move, it flickers or pulses in some way, hard to explain - Looks horrific. Think I'll stay vanilla until a better solution appears.
Yeah, I tried it out on release day and disabled it for that reason.
 
Had to turn off SSAO again. Looks great in screenshots but whenever you move, it flickers or pulses in some way, hard to explain - Looks horrific. Think I'll stay vanilla until a better solution appears.
 
It only crashes when I enter the "bonechill passage." If I'm out in the open it all works fine.

I've done the following:

Turn off all OC
Use original config's
Turn off all nvidia inspector settings

I was finally able to get past this part. I did some searching and it'd seem like running the game in "windowed" mode was the key to get through this particular section.

So if anyone has a random spot in which their game keeps crashing, give it a shot!
 
Had to turn off SSAO again. Looks great in screenshots but whenever you move, it flickers or pulses in some way, hard to explain - Looks horrific. Think I'll stay vanilla until a better solution appears.

Don't get any of that (using High Quality Fallout 3 AO).

I only see one for self-shadowing, bTreesReceiveShadows=1 what's the second?

The land shadows value just below the tree entry. In my experience, it does nothing, and I've never seen anyone produce a screenshot proving that it does work.
 
That explains it then, you're about on the cusp of what the 560 Ti can handle. If Bethesda can optimize the shadows and some other stuff you may gain enough spare perf, or you could try and OC your CPU/GPU.

Are you still running these settings for your config?

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=32717568&postcount=2835

If not, would you mind posting your newer configs and highlighting the differences?

I noticed that you have AO enabled but nothing picked under compatiability. Does that mean AO is not being applied based on these settings? You also have AA set to none? doesn't this override the in game AA?
 
Are you still running these settings for your config?

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=32717568&postcount=2835

If not, would you mind posting your newer configs and highlighting the differences?

I noticed that you have AO enabled but nothing picked under compatiability. Does that mean AO is not being applied based on these settings? You also have AA set to none? doesn't this override the in game AA?

Yea, that's all old and busted. I'll try and compile everything and update it.

Edit: Here you go...

Test Area Shot (Water, Mountains, Distance Details, uGrids, Shadows, etc): http://h11.abload.de/img/tesv2011-11-2718-25-0rqjke.png
NVI Settings: http://h11.abload.de/img/nvi7djcd.png
SkyrimPrefs.ini: http://pastebin.com/fPXJu7v1
Skyrim.ini: http://pastebin.com/KkAjNGZB

In the end I turned on FXAA as there was too much sharpening from all the AA. With the HQ AF the blur was lessened and it came out just about right. Still can't do anything about those shitty shadowing crawls on some surfaces, however.
 
So, I posted this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScY5ipR8upU a while ago... anyway, I have the same laptop but the game is nowhere as smooth as that, even on the lowest settings. I tried re installing, updating the video driver but no dice.

My brother, who has an old Core 2Duo with a GTX260 can run this game much better than mine... on the other hand Crysis 2 runs with DX11 and everything on Extreme is smooth as hell on my laptop.

anyway, how can I fix this?
 
So, I posted this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScY5ipR8upU a while ago... anyway, I have the same laptop but the game is nowhere as smooth as that, even on the lowest settings. I tried re installing, updating the video driver but no dice.

My brother, who has an old Core 2Duo with a GTX260 can run this game much better than mine... on the other hand Crysis 2 runs with DX11 and everything on Extreme is smooth as hell on my laptop.

anyway, how can I fix this?

Start by turning down shadows and general LOD settings and terrain map distances. If you're really struggling, turn down shadow res to 2048 (default is 4096). Exterior shadow distance to 2000 and shadow filter to 2. Consider also turning off tree shadows and land shadows. It's compromises but you gotta do what you gotta do.
 
Installed some graphics mods, menu mod and more RAM mod yesterday and my game is running incredibly now! Only one problem and I was wondering if someone here could help me pinpoint what it might be... My interactions are now delayed. Trying to open doors, finishing talking with NPCs, mining, that sort of thing. I'll press E and about 30 seconds later the action will actually happen. First noticed when I tried opening a dungeon door, didn't work, so I resumed exploring and magically teleported to the dungeon :lol

Anyone have ideas on what could be causing this? I really don't want to uninstall all my mods and try them one at a time.
 
84,133 people. Including me.
It looks incredible and it's only when you've installed Enhanced Night Skyrim that you realize how low-res the vanilla night sky is. The version with High Density is the best in my opinion, doesn't feel like too much at all.
 
84,133 people. Including me.
It looks incredible and it's only when you've installed Enhanced Night Skyrim that you realize how low-res the vanilla night sky is. The version with High Density is the best in my opinion, doesn't feel like too much at all.

Thanks. Are you using the blue one or the colour one?
 
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