Skyrim on XPS 15 (L502x) anyone?

Just curious if anyone else is playing it on the L502x and, if so, how well does it play?

Currently playing on external LCD at 1920x1200. Using Skyrim's "high" setting, but with anti-aliasing turned off and anisotropic filtering disabled. Seems to be playing at the very limit of what the 540M can do.

One thing I noticed: I had to set the file TESV.EXE in the Skyrim folder to use nVidia GPU. Setting the SkyrimLauncher.EXE to nVidia GPU was not enough.

 

Wow, you're actually getting usable framerates like that?

I'm playing at 1600x900 (yes I have the 1080p screen), AA off, Anisotropic off, texture med, radial blur low, shadow med, decal med, FXAA on, Reflect land only (this is pretty much medium settings).

Like this, I get about 40-55 fps in general play, dropping to around 25-30 in major battles. I've also tweaked some of the object/actor/itme fades, else you sometimes can't see people attacking you!:O

Did you disable vsync? Or did you not have laggy mouse problem?

Running i7-2630 and 540M.

 

I have:
Texture Quality: High
Radial Blur: Medium
Shadow: Low
Decal: None
FXAA: Off
Reflections: All Off
AA: Off
Anisotropic: Off

That's essentially the "high" setting except for AA and Anistropic turned off. "High" was what was recommended by the Skyrim installer.

I only have mouse lag when interacting with the game menu (inventory, magic, etc). I tried the "bMouseAcceleration=0" trick, but it made no difference for me. Haven't tried VSYNC yet.

 

I run on 'High' settings with 1366x768 resolution (I do have the 1080p display, but Skyrim looks pretty good with the lower res, unlike some games such as Riift)

My framerates vary from 25-60 really, but generally very smooth.

 

It plays better than oblivion!
Im on a L501x; i5; GT420M overclocked to 650/1300/900 running it at 1366x768 (dont have the 1080p )
Everythings set to High except shadows (which look stupid even at ultra!); FXAA on, 4x Anistropy, FPS is always above 30!!

I dont use the mouse in the inventory, just WSAD the all through it, pretty comfortable now.

 

I realised that Skyrim was using less than half of the CPU max, so I disabled the turbo in the BIOS (much easier than mucking around with ThrottleStop! And I've got an SSD so it's a really quick reboot to enable it if need be...). This limits my i7 to 2GHz, and it tops out at about 75C. The thermal headroom this gives me lets me overclock my GT 540M to 815MHz on the graphics clock (up from 672MHz), and 1050MHz on the memory clock (up from 900MHz). It runs stable with no artefaces after 2 hours of play. GPU still sitting at a relatively cool 73C.

On to the point of this post - doing this lets me ramp up the graphics quality quite a bit! Wow! It's a GORGEOUS game!

 

What settings and resolution are you running at pjcronje? I would like to compare.

 

For now, still testing overclock stability. Ran well for a while, then suddenly changed to intergrated HD3000 as opposed to GT 540M

At the moment, I'm hitting 1600x900, high default setting but with AA/anistropic/FXAA off. Will let you know framerate once I get the 540M to work with the game again... it's set to use it in the nVidia control panel! maybe it's the beta drivers, running 285.79 beta.

 

Okay that sounds fairly similar to my results, and about the drivers, have you noticed a performance increase at all? I am still running on 285.62. Thanks.

 

I think I figured out what happened. From what I can tell, nVidia control panel downloads game profiles in the background. So I manually created one for Skyrim, then it downloaded a new one that uses the 540M, but got confused somehow and switched to the integrated instead....

 

pjcronje, I had to set both EXE's in the Skyrim folder to use nVidia GPU. If I only set the Skyrim icon (which points to SkyrimLauncher.exe), the game would revert to HD3000. After I added TESV.exe to nVidia GPU, the problem went away.

Did you see the same issue?

 

That technique of optimizing thermal headroom is a brilliant idea. I've also noticed that Skyrim doesn't max out any of the cores. They all seem to sit around 25-30% usage. The game must have some effective multi-threading going on, because all the cores seem to be sharing the load quite well.

 

Good to see a program finally doing good multi-threading. Usually it's "max out one core, ooooo, look, we've got another, we'll use that one next" and so on...

Toying with getting this game. But for now I've got 2 other sandbox games I haven't touched in over a year...

Agreed about the thermal headroom technique, that is truly a great idea for a case like this. I noticed last night that the recommended specs for this game are a quad-core CPU, 4GB RAM (not that that's an issue with newer systems), and a GTX 260 (desktop variant). That's some pretty hefty specs!

 

Noticed temps get upto 85c on the cpu when playing skyrim, anyone else get temps that high? Gpu stays at around 73c. Runs well though get about 40-60fps outside on ultra.

 

Curious what your CPU % usage is for your cores during the game to generate that much heat.

 

I'll check next time im on it. But ive never seen it higher than 85c so dont know if its skyrims dodgy optimisation or what, i'll check it after the next patch aswell.

 

Here we go, my definitive, not very scientific results:

Ran Skyrim with the settings shown:
- Dell XPS 15 L502x
- i7-2630QM with turbo switched off in BIOS
- 8GB Corsair RAM
- GT 540M overclocked to 825/1050, with 285.79 beta drivers
- Win7 x64 Ultimate (fwiw)



Interesting how the utility shows Intel Graphics, no way that gets used!

Used FRAPS to benchmark 7 various scenes of 60 secs each. This was all outdoors (the most strenuous) - battle scenes, mountains, trees, water and reflections, snow and dust. Dragons, giants and mammoths. Lots of fire and hacking/slashing. Up to 6 enemies on screen at once.

FRAPS reports average FPS in CSV format, so I had 7 x 60 = 420 individual FPS results. The stats are:
- Min = 26
- Max = 64
- Average = 38
- 99% of data points are at or above 30FPS
- 75% is at or above 36FPS



CPU maxed out at 79C. GPU at 69C. Note how CPU maxed out at 46% utilisation. You can see the GPU clocks too.



Other "mods" are repasting with Arctic MX-4, removal of dust filter at intake fan, and running on a raised stand (one of those ergonomic things, no fans, just sloped, with a big hole where the intake fan is, so probably similar to using a 9-cell battery).

I'm quite happy with the results. I'd rather run slightly lower settings and get better framerate, than max out the detail and barely average 30. To me, that's unplayable. That being said, I wonder how much overclock room I have... I'll play around a bit more with the settings, and try run more benchmarks to get better results.

 

Some more stats: this time, I did 8 runs of 60 seconds each, total of 480 data points. All settings exactly the same as before, except one change - Advanced Options, Distant Object Detail was set to "high".

Min = 22
Max = 55
Average = 35
93% at or above 30FPS



This time, GPU was 70C, CPU was 80C.

On a side note, I stopped after 8 runs because it crashed to desktop, no warning, no error message, nothing. This has happened a few times, and the culprit is either the overclock or FRAPS. I think it's FRAPS, but I can't reliably reproduce the crashes. The reason I think it's NOT the overclock is that 1. I don't get any artefacts or glitches, and 2. did you see my GPU max temp? It used to run way hotter before the repaste and never gave any issues. Of course, overclocking has other stability issues not necessarily related to heat, and I also have no way to measure VRAM (GPU memory) temps (given I'm doing almost 17% overclock of VRAM clock).
It's very playable at these settings, and looks great! The 22FPS was in a forest during the day, lots of grass and shadows.

 

Nice work but turn your shadows down to low and see what fps you get then. Shadows is the real fps eater, from ultra to low you can save up to 20fps. Really low temps to but expected with a re paste and your not putting much strain on the cpu with turbo boost turned off. Try turning it on and see what difference it makes.

 

I get high GPU temps; around 80 C... but am on a gt 420m so thats to be expected...

Also set "busethreadedparticlesystem=1", gives a good 5 fps boost near waterfalls, large fires etc...

Skyrim dosent seem to be using more than 400 mb or so of vram even though more is available!!

 

I'm away this weekend, but I'll try it when I can and let you know.

 

Skyrim must be fantastically optimized. I've been running it since yesterday on my 15z on high settings and AA on at 1920x1080 and it's perfectly playable and my GPU temp never hit 90C, although the CPU did hit 98, but it tends to do that no matter what I play if I'm playing at length. I'm really impressed with the game, not just as a game but at how well it seems to run on my hardware. the 525M is mid-range at best.

 

I think those with i7's will notice a higher performance than those with i5's and i3's, more than normal - people with i7's have been saying that they have much better performance. Maybe Skyrim utilizes the CPU more?

 

I think so as my cpu gets to about 85c my gpu only gets to about 75c overclocked! But there are desktop users with i7 2600k's and gtx 580 sli getting horrible performance so bethesda still have a lot of work to do.

 

98!? Ouch I'd do something about that if I was you...

 

Remember he is using the 15z, which has much poorer heat management due to the tighter packed components in the smaller chassis.

 

I'm not concerned about it. I know the thermal limit is 100C and the processor will throttle itself to get it back to a safe temp. And I said it peaked at 98, I doubt it sustained that temperature for very long. And as Kallzeh said, the 15z is extremely thin (.97 inches) so heat is expected. I'm more amazed I can run the game on such high settings than I am by the temperature. The i7 is pretty hot regardless because of the high clock speed of the processor, but the GPU never even hit 90 which is awesome.

 

Actually, mine has crashed to the desktop about 4 times since the game first came out. Same thing, no error messages. Each time it was after several hours of gaming. I'm not overclocking or using FRAPS. Anyone else seeing this desktop crash?

On an unrelated note, I've been playing around with "Ultra" settings, though, testing out the incredible eye candy (love that Aurora Borealis and the way the fog drifts around the mountain-tops). Seems playable with occasional stuttering during outdoor combat.

 

Its crashing due to the game, bethesda are releasing a patch soon

 

Tomorrow, according to Bethesda's blog.

Anyone else tried the new nVidia beta drivers? 290.36. How's it going? It's supposed to enable some special lighting effects in SKyrim, not sure if it has or hasn't, I haven't noticed anything.

Lastly, my overclock is going well. I always play on 825-850 Mhz core and 1050 Mhz memory. Temps never above 70C for GPU and 80C for CPU. I play on pretty much ultra, at 1600x900, with some item/object fade sliders dialled sown a little and AA off. Completely stable after over 20 hours of gameplay. My Nord is level 23!

 

Myself at level 32 High Elf

Been playing at the Ultra setting (with AA off) for a while now, a little sluggish at times, but quite enjoyable. I've noticed an occasional "flicker" of the shadows, though, even when just standing still staring at the screen. Shadows seem blocky at times as well.

Hoping the coming patch has "Large Address Aware" built in. Seems ridiculous not to be using the RAM that modern machines have.

pjcronje, what app are you using for the GPU overclock?

 

Using a mod to get 4GB!

For overclock, I just use the nVidia control panel with nVidia System Tools installed. I find it's more predictable than MSI Afterburner. I want to set the clocks manually when I play, and it has happened on occasion that Afterburner kept the clocks after a restart.

I get the shadow flicker too, tried various settings (high, med, low), seems worse on low.

 

I just bought the Intel Core i5-2430M, 6G Ram, GT 525M 1GB version. What do you guys recommend me running the game at? I use it mostly as a desktop, I have a HDMI to DVI cable that goes to my monitor.

I originally bought an HP from Bestbuy black friday deal: HP Pavilion dv6-6117dx with A8-3500M Quad Core/AMD Radeon HD 6620G discrete. The freaking bestbuy Geek Squad told me that it will run the game with 1600x1050 at medium settings. What a lie. It does like 15 FPS at 1280x800 with medium settings. Hope the XPS 15 will hold up. I'm not huge gamer. I haven't played a PC game for 2-3 years but really want to enjoy Skyrim.

 

I can get pretty good framerates (40-60 FPS) at 1600x900 on medium settings on GT 540M without overclocking. So taking into account 16% more pixels at 1600x1050, and that I have approximately 15% more CPU and GPU power each, you should get 24-36 FPS. I'd be curious to what it actually is.

If you overclock the GPU to 540M levels, you should be able to play on high even.

Make sure you turn anti-aliasing (priority 1!) and anistropic filtering (priority 3) off, and shadows to low (priority 2). Those three are eaters of FPS!

 

Yeah, I can pretty much play at maximum settings if I turn off those 3

 

Just got a thermaltake massive23 lx cooler, and here are my results
gt 525m Oc'd to 700.
no AA, AF, shadows low, everything else ultra, 1600x900
I get 30-35 fps consistently, dips only into 20s, with gpu and cpu temps rarely exceeding 77 C

 

Wondering if someone on this forum can help me with a conundrum I have. Am currently getting the PC version for Christmas, but after seeing the Xbox version recently on special offer for just half price I'm now torn between the two versions.

I really want to enjoy it though during my time off over the holidays, and while my laptop certainly won't run it at max settings I'm a bit concerned it won't run it well enough to my liking (30fps+) at medium settings either, despite the claims of posters on this page.

It's a second gen i5 2410M 2.30ghz sandy bridge processor with 525m graphics chip and 4GB ram (Dell XPS 15 L502x) and it'll play recent stuff like Deus EX and Arkham city reasonably well at mid/high (not max) (the benchmark on the latter really struggled with one section of glass shards flying everywhere however). None of the components are OC'd, I wouldn't even begin to know how to do that safely

Problem is, Skyrim is a huge open world compared to those two games as I probably don't need to tell you and has a lot more stuff to render. Anyone know of good benchmark or similar tool I can use to gauge my PC's effectiveness? Youtube videos of gamers with the same rig report decent fps of between 30 and 50 on mid-high settings but at higher screen resolutions. Comments on the same videos however are from people with the same or higher spec laptops unable to match the scores.

If I can get it looking and playing as good as the Xbox, I'll stick with what I have, simply because I love the option of having awesome cheats and mods for the future. I do really like some of the dungeon lighting effects displayed on the 360's video walkthroughs though, and want those on the PC.

Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated

 

Benchmarks are synthetic and will never tell you how any one game will perform.

The fact is that if you're willing to play at medium settings and perhaps even drop the resolution to 1600x900 or 1280x720, you will get decent (30-35+) frames per second.

Not sure what other evidence you'd like? People on this forum have played it at those settings with those results with that hardware. You can choose to ignore it if you'd like - power to you.

 

I play on a 525M at my native resolution and since I'm coming from a long history of console gaming I'm comfortable at the lower framerates, but I get on average 25-35FPS in skyrim with AA on and pretty much everything set to high at 1920x1080. YMMV, but at lower settings and resolution I really think you'll be able to get 35+FPS.

 

FWIW, had to play on battery a couple of times recently. Starting with a fully-charged, 9-cell battery, I got 80 minutes of continuous playtime before it forced itself to sleep.:SLEEP: Don't know whether that's impressive or not.

 

I found this guide written by nVidia on optimising graphics settings for Skyrim, linked straight from Skyrim's homepage, The Elder Scrolls Official Site

Read through it as I will be trying to get the most out of this game come Christmas too and it gives some very good details on what settings effect FPS the most.

For those that don't want to waste valuable game time to read, like has been mentioned already, either turn off outdoor shadows completely or turn them to very low(not sure of the available settings as I don't have the game yet) and you will increase FPS dramatically.

 

I get roughly 30-40 fps on high at 1080p with some viewing distances lowered. Only some stutters like when i go down to the thieves guild with all the fog. Other than that very pleased with the gt 540m's performance and latest Nvidia driver.

 

I don't know what it is about the Thieves' Guild/Cistern area, but I'm getting the same massive slowdown in FPS when I'm down there.

 

The cistern for the thieves guild is a clusterf*** for the framerate, probably because of volumetric lighting effects.
TO all who don't know, there exists a thing called the Skyrim acceleration layer (TESVAL) mod for skse. It optimizes the use of the processor and puts performance back on your graphics card, rather than the cpu trying to render places like riften. Google it and you shant regret.

 

Here it is ^^^ TESV Acceleration Layer at Skyrim Nexus - Skyrim Mods and community its meant to help fps for cpu intensive areas.

 

That's the one. Couple that with the latest patch and the latest beta nvidia drivers and you should get the max performance possible

 

Ok thanks, i will try it out. i have heard good things from it but just havn't got around to it.

 

That's interesting. I traced CPU usage while in the Thieves' Guild. The result shows all 4 cores at less than 30% each (just as it is with all the other maps). That indicates that the game is still overwhelmingly GPU-limited (especially in the Thieves' Guild). Shifting more of the workload from the CPU to the GPU would seem to only make matters worse.

Any other thoughts on this?

 

I read up a bit on the patch and it's doing things so the code gets executed faster.
If you read the few threads about the patch they will explain what's happening in more detail.

It "inlines" some simple getters and setters. Basically when the game was compiled some method calls were compiled to assembly as move commands, so when your CPU gets to that piece of code it then jumps to a different point in the code to execute that method, then jumps back to where it was. So when you "inline" that method, rather than placing the move command, it places the actual code to execute at that point meaning your CPU can just execute the code and continue so it does the job faster. Even if the CPU isn't at full load it will still be able to execute an "inlined" method faster.

Hope that helps a little
And I am not an expert in assembly or compliers or anything so there may be some in-accuracies in my description but that's the basic idea of what's happening. Any corrections welcomed.

 

From what I now understand, this moves some code around so that it can be accessed in fewer instructions (Basically, if a function you want to call is too far away in RAM, you need multiple instructions to access it). This makes things like loops (used a lot for constantly generated actions like npcs) much more efficient. If a function is going to be run 10000 times, the less lines of code, the better.
I think because a lot of us have quad cores and the like w don't see much cpu utilization decrease, but I do get a slight fps increase everywhere. It is most noticeable in places like riften topside, which is npc heavy.