Skyrim on 8600m GT?

A friend of mine bought my old Vostro 1500 laptop from me a while ago. It has 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo and 8600m GT with 1680x1050 screen. Has anyone tried running Skyrim with similar specs. He's away from home for work for several months at a time this time of year and thought I could get him a decent game to help him pass the time when he's off work. His internet connection is spotty in the hotel, so not the best for online gaming.

 

My 9600M GT (ddr2) isn't able to run it on 1280x720, so a 8600M GT is never able of running Skyrim at 1680x1050.

 

Won't run it at all? Or just miserable framerates? It is overclocked a decent amount and has 3DMark06 of 3800+.

 

you're looking at 20 fps on low@1280*720, I'm not sure what the performance will be at 1680*1050

 

Forget 1680*1050...i think the best your friend will be able to do is 1024x768 with very low settings

 

Thanks. Debating if its worth it now.

I have actually been able to get Skyrim working on my Asus Eee 1215b netbook with E-350 APU (HD 6310 GPU) at 800x480, all low at about 20 fps. Surprisingly it doesn't play too horribly. Of course you lose a lot of the feeling of the game.

 

just sorta depends on expectations. I get upset and start debugging as soon as I start to see any type of slowdown, gaming at 1080p. But some people are more than happy to game at low settings.

Why dont you give your friend some of those GoG games. They will run great on his system

 

How about Oblivion instead of Skyrim? Similar game, but will run much better on that machine. You could probably get it to go at native resolution as well.

 

Lowest settings 800x600. that's the way my friend played it. Runs "well".

GX600 512mb ddr2 version of 86gt, 2.5GHz c2d, 3GB ram.

 

Hmm I have a Dell Inspiron 1420 that lags playing flash games and it has that card I believe.

 

Thanks guys. I actually played and finished both Bioshock and Crysis on that laptop at 1280x800. Surprised it doesn't handle Skyrim all that well.

Oh well. Thanks for the input. I think I will consider something else.

 

Well here is how my roommate plays it. He has a Radeon 3450M and he can play it medium-low at 800x600 soo... Unless that is tolerable, it is already hitting pretty low.

 

Overclock that 8600m gt and enjoy low res gaming, I used an Inspiron 1720 to play Fallout 3 at pretty decent settings 1024x768. Looking at Skyrim it really shouldn't have much more requirements, just keep the res low so you don't max out the vram

 

Skyrim needs a powerful cpu to handle the cpu rendered shadows. Might help if you can OC the CPU.

Then again it might be better to just turn shadows off completely.

 

Turn off shadows completely and, since it's a 16:10 screen, run it at 1024x640.

 

I don't think you can get Skyrim down to the lowest possible setting just by adjusting graphics in the launcher. You'll be able to do more by tweaking the .ini file. Also go into Nvidia Control Panel anf force V-sync off and turn everything to lowest quality/max performance.

Finally, go online see if there are any performance enhancing mods that will work for this laptop.

 

Ah hadn't even thought of the cpu, oc that as well to squeeze every frame out possible. Sometimes the extra couple frames make things much smoother

 

Not possible to OC on that machine. I tried in past with no success. I think I was able to get it at 2.4GHz instead of 2.2GHz, but that was because of all the restrictions in the hardware and bios.

 

If it doesn't have any problems with the extra 200mhz squeezed why not have it oc'd for that little bit? When running older hardware overclocking becomes a very good friend even when it doesn't offer much.

 

Playing Skyrim for a while on my Inspiron 1520, Core2Duo 7500 (2,2Ghz) 8600GT. Playable @1024x720, however details needs to kept @low. You can keep the textures quality @medium, 256MB of VRAM seems to be handling them well. And keep the latest drivers to avoid textures corruption.

 

someone managed to play it @720p medium setting! don't know about you but looks pretty playable for me!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLGIjgk11fM

 

they're using a faster card and got more performance... so I don't know...

 

The 9600M GT is really a 8600M GT but with a more stable die and higher clocks. The architecture hasn't really changed per se. Should work if you use modified .dll's with some OC-ing on the GPU end.

 

I didn't mean to imply that the reason the 9600m gt is significantly faster was due to architectural differences, it's just faster, like you said. None of that really makes a difference for the end user who just sees the end-performance, and is abstracted from architecture and other machine level specifics. The game will run on both cards, but the GPU is likely the major contributing factor to the performance difference, not turning off steam or mouse acceleration. The custom DLL may also contribute, since the rendering DLL has a pretty direct impact on performance. Still- it seems like for the performance they said they had (not the performance in the video, which was worse) - that mostly can be attributed to the GPU.

 

no problem here's he 8600M GT one..and pay attention to the descripsion!
Skyrim on a 256MB Graphics Card - YouTube

 

Those are pretty much my specs, haha. But yeah it's playable on a 8600m gt with my 2.1ghz core 2 duo. I turn the shadows all the way off (from ini). Game runs at 15-20 FPS (i think) on med-low settings. I run win xp and overclock my 8600 by about 25%. The game also freezes occasionally when it eats through all the RAM and has to reload all the textures. Overall it's definitely playable as long as you care more about the story than the eye candy.

 

That's called PowerPoint mode.