TES V: Skyrim Discussion Thread

Spiffy. Looks like the Psijic Order robe.

 

I think this game is stunning with right mods. Only play on high with 2x AA though.

 

I am also curious what you used for this.

 

Why not enable FXAA and disable AA?

 

Is it possible to wipe out the Dark Brotherhood?

They tried to assassinate me, and I take that personal.

 

Spoiler

Yes, indeed it is.

 

Anyone have the TESV.exe from before the Steam update they could share? I can't restore a previous version of it cause there weren't any restore points made inbetween when I installed Skyrim and Steam pushed that update that messed up the .exe


Edit: Nevermind. An update was posted for the 4GB mod that gets around the new DRM crap from Steam.

 

I used BSA unpacker, link here, to unpack the skyrim's textures.

I then used GIMP photo editor to change the file of my choice (photoshop also works), you have to download the DSS plug in for your program. To use them in game, you just have to move the edited texture folder into your data folder.

 

Oh you did it yourself, cool. I do not think I have the patience or creativity for that.

 

This may be a bit late pal but if it's any use to you, I'm playing Skyrim on a 555M, everything on High and 4x AA... if you go with the 560M it should cope fine on Ultra (it performs 30-50% faster than my card pretty much across the board).

 

I have the 560m running. I was a little frustrated that i can play it on ultra (or high, didnt really make a difference) with only 30 fps... If anyone knows any ways to up the fps on high w/o sacrficing any of the graphics, a post would be appreciated.

 

30? I'm seeing 40+ on High on a 460m in the area of Whiterun.

(AA disabled. There is no need to run AA at 1080p/17" screen, and it's not a luxury you can afford on a mid-range chip in intensive games anyway.)

 

you should see a little boost if you disable vsync in the SkyrimPrefs.ini and turn off AA (you can use FXAA instead of regular AA).

Also I read that the guy who publishes the tweak guide on tweakguides.com will be posting one for Skyrim soon

 

560M isn't a high end GPU by any stretch. Expecting to run it at Ultra is just hogwash dream.

 

Whats your average fps for outdoors??

 

It runs on Ultra on my 5830m, which I understand to be significantly slower than the 560m. From what I gather, Vapkez is already running the game on Ultra and getting a solid 30fps, he's just asking for advice to boost his frame rate higher.

 

Yes, you are correct. When I turned AA off and was on high settings I was getting around 40-50 FPS in Whiterun and 60 indoors, however I would rather play on ultra with 40 if possible.

 

Prove it. I want to see your laptop playing Skyrim on Ultra which is 8x AA with 16x AF. Film it and prove it, you can play at at 1080p with 40 FPS or even 30 FPS.

 

Dude Chill. Ultra settings is only ensuring that everything but AA and AF are on HD resolution.

AA and AF in my honest opinion are not required to run Ultra or to enjoy Ultra. Even on my 6990M, I don't even use AA nor do I care for it. The 1080p resolution is more than suffice to mitigate the worst of jagging.

As a former Envy 15 owner myself, the 5830M is just a 5870M running on GDDR3 instead as a way for HP to make the Envy run cool and not power hungry for the form factor it was aiming towards. Without AA, it is possible to run on Ultra textures and shaders with no problems.

AA is the culprit to most GPU FPS performance and it is in my opinion, not a necessary dependent for determining graphic performance.

Therefore chill and don't be elitist either... The economy is already giving many gamers headaches...

 

Maxing out the AF to 16 samples doesn't really seem to reduce the framerate at all for me. Not really any significant change in performance compared to disabled AF, although it greatly improves the visuals.

I have increased the grass draw distance setting in SkyrimPrefs.ini - this also did not noticeably reduce framerate but also resulted in some visual improvement. I tried changing some of the SkyrimPrefs shadow settings and tree fade distance, but in my opinion these tweaks made the game look worse than vanilla settings, so I changed them back.

I'm currently using FXAA mode, which resulted in a very slight performance boost after switching from using 8xAA; however, the game was still quite playable even with 8xAA. Also noticed a bit of a boost after disabling vsync.

Haven't used FRAPS with this game so far, but I will check some frame rates and try to see what sort of difference it makes using FXAA vs. 8xAA. Visually I honestly cannot tell the difference between 8xAA vs. FXAA. The other graphics settings including AF, texture quality, distant object detail, shadow quality, etc., seemed to make a more significant visual impact compared with AA.

The only areas I noticed where the game seems to lag a bit is in Riften, Markarth and some of the forest areas around Falkreath with a lot of foilage.

I'll be very interested to read Koroush Ghazi's Skyrim Tweak Guide:

 

It's not Ultra if it's not 8x AA and 16x AF. That's what makes it Ultra. And I do not get anywhere close to a steady 40 FPS with Ultra setting in Skyrim, running it vanilla without any other added mods with snow blowing, in a dense forest, my fps suffers huge.

This is not about being elitist. I just know PC Gamers have a huge tendency to lie about their framerate and not telling the truth. Average framerate is almost always 5-10 fps lower than what they claim as they claim. Framerate drop is annoying and we all notice it when we play, yet players posting on forums seem to intentionally not mention that. I don't care if you can get 60 FPS in a corridor in a dungeon, big deal.

Dude, I have a 5870M so I know you can't get steady average 40 FPS with Ultra settings in Skyrim. I'm running the 11.11a performance drivers, and overclocked 815/1125. Much faster than a 5830M. Running around in the wilderness I'm averaging around 17-25 FPS. Not just staring at a wall in a dungeon.

Spoiler

 

@vapkez, you can try overclocking. You can reasonably gain 15-20% improved performance.

 

To be honest with you, I dislike how people judge "Ultra" based on developer presets. Most presets the developers put on "Ultra" are totally overkill and pointless to show off to the people that brought over-price rigs to flaunt their egos to the rest of the 95%. What is considered for "Ultra" to be for Ultra is truely based on the essentials: Textures, Shaders, Lighting and Shadows (with Lighting and Shadows based on player's own preference). Resolution, AA and AF are mostly in the past excluded from the setting because they are player-dependent variable. Depending on the setup, AA and AF are totally no necessary and will waste countless loads of graphical resources for minimal eyecandy (especially on AA). Furthermore, resolution is also dependent on what monitor the player has and such. Therefore you can't say "Ultra" by forcing often excluded variables in the historical past in to the count. Therefore as a guide, I NEVER count AA, AF or Resolution on the settings but only the essentials of the core four features.

It is sad that most people HAVE to wag their tails to what developers say what "Ultra" means. You know that most developers these days are getting too lazy to make proper presets that are necessary to set the guidelines and ones that don't.

Therefore I am not agreeing with your standards at all and I don't have a right to incline to match your standards if I am only complying to what the guidelines were historically was set to gamers.

In fact I think the terms "Maximum", "High" and "Ultra" are way overused and incorrectly used to the realms of "Epic" or "Fail."

/end of rant

PS: To be blunt as long as the game isn't choppy, it is good enough for me. Screw the Frames Per Second debate over Skyrim.

 

Doesn't matter what "YOUR" standards are.

Ultra is 8x AA and 16x AF. That's what makes it Ultra. It's that simple. If you're not running 8x AA 16x AF and everything maxed, it's not Ultra.

 

That is total Bethsoft bootlicker there. Bethsoft doesn't not create the standard. The standard is in the core features universally accepted for many, many years now. AA is never considered to be integral to make a setting rating better.

Enough said.

 

Perhaps not, certainly eyeballing it, it is probably significantly lower than that in Markarth and Riften.

However, I have not claimed steady average 40FPS. I was responding to your claim to Vapkez that:

As I've already been running this game for 160 hours at 1080p on Ultra settings with a card that is slower than Vapkez's 560m, I find your comment to be quite misguided.

In my case, for the first 30-40 hours, I was running the game with every setting in the graphics options menu completely maxed, including 8xAA, max object detail, texture quality, shadow quality, etc. ("Ultra" settings comprise a lot more than just anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering.)

Then I tried switching to FXAA, disabling vsync and modifying the SkyrimPrefs to increase grass draw distance beyond what is possible in the graphics settings menu. I kept all the other settings the same (maxed). The net result of this was a very slight boost in performance. The game has been running fine at 1920x1080 resolution with these settings for about 120 hours.

In total over the course of 160 hours, the game has crashed about 5 times. As I mentioned, the only areas that seem especially laggy are Riften, Markarth and dense forest with lots of vegetation near Falkreath. (And it is still quite playable in those areas, much more playable than The Witcher 2 on "low" settings.)

I played around a bit with the settings and I noticed no difference in frame rate going from 0AF to 16xAF, however, it resulted in significant visual improvement. As for AA, I noticed a slight performance improvement switching from 8xAA to FXAA, but visually I could not tell the difference between the two.

In contrast to Skyrim, The Witcher 2 ran like a slideshow for me even with everything at the lowest possible settings. It was so laggy that I stopped playing after about 10-15 hours, as the controls were very unresponsive. I may need to play that game on a lower than native resolution, even on low settings.

 

And you've never run any tool to actual see what framerate you are getting. I have.

You can't run 5830M at Ultra settings with steady 40 FPS. Not even close. If you say you can, then you're just lying. Cause that's what the dude with the 560M is asking for, Ultra setting with 40 FPS. He's not going to get that. Hogwash dream.

 

That must be a driver thing. The 5870M can run it on High at 1080p fine. Then again the 5830M is kind of a special one-off card for HP so support for it might not be as good as the others.

I know my friend that is now the owner of my Envy 15 can't even run Magicka right on it.

Can't we all just enjoy the damn game and stop making every game flame war involving the stupid thing called Frames Per Second???

If it isn't choppy and you can play it, then play it. There I said it.

 

Not talking about high. Dude is asking for Ultra setting with 40 FPS. No 5870M can do that, and most definitely not a 5830M.

I run mine with high preset, shadows on medium, no AA, no FXAA, with INI tweaked for tree/land shadow, shadow size to 2048, increase the deferredshadowblur. And I'm getting around 40 FPS in dense forest, stupid framerate drop to 25 in cities, but even people with HD6970 desktop are experiencing that, and around 60 FPS in dungeons.

At least I don't exaggerate or blatantly lie about it. I can't run it on Ultra, and don't believe even for a second that a 5830M can. Unless that 5830M is overclocked to 920/1300...

 

READ what I QUOTED...

I am talking about WITCHER 2...

 

Why? That makes no sense. Starforge is right, player dependant variables should not be included in the argument. However i do absolutely agree with you that people inflate their fps.

And to Wiley. I did at one point use a modest OC. I was also using the 275.?? driver that i needed to mod the .inf file to use. (clevo's hardware is never compatible with the new drivers...) After a few days my screen went blank and then started having wierd lines. The video card stopped working and i never knew if it was the driver or my OC.

So i guess i am open to suggestions. Ill turn off AA and put on FXAA. Any other ideas, or shold i just wait for the tweaks guide?

**Ideally I just want to have it run smooth around 40 fps outdoors and not have such massive fps drops when i move my cursor.

 

did you try disabling vsync?

 

I don't think you need FXAA either. You'll notice FXAA has a huge tendency to blur and to increase bloom. That's the default setting Bethesda is using. FXAA is interesting because you can tweak the sharpness, bloom, saturation, pre/post sharpening, etc.

There isn't much you can do to improve performance. Even using the patched DX9 dll from ENB will decrease your FPS. Bethesda did use some DX11 calls which all for increased performance. So the current FXAA Injector mod which requires you to run their modded dx9 dll will decrease performance as well. Running Skyrim in DX9 is worse in performance.

Pretty much all the INI tweaks I've seen are about increasing detail, fixing shadow etc, haven't seen much for performance.

I suppose you can try reducing the distance. Since this game is quite expansive in terms of view outside of dungeons. Though that means you'll experience more texture pop-in.

I'd wait to see what Bethesda gives us for the upcoming patch after Thanksgiving, next week. I think we can expect one next week. That hopefully will resolve some issues with the flashing shadows, low framerate in towns and maybe some optimizations?

 

@moviemarketing

I will try that later tonight, no. What does it do? Thats the only thing i never took the time to read about.
And at the guy flaming, i have been getting 30-35 fps on ultra with the max AA (16x?) and max everything else. It just gets choppy when i move my cursor quickly, thats what i really care about. It is not a hogwash dream, if i had the ability to OC and get the new drivers, no problem. However, i am waiting for a reponse to see what i should do about that because i do not want to damage my hardware.

 

If you are using Triple-Buffering VSync than that shouldn't affect FPS, but the normal will.

 

Incidentally, I have also noticed that the frame rate is often better in third person view.

Third person is much more viable than Oblivion; in fact the melee animations generally look better in third person than in first person view. I noticed I'm playing about 80% of the time in third person, only switching to first person in order to use archery.

I'm not familiar with what exactly FXAA does; however, I tried switching back and forth between FXAA and 8xAA and I really couldn't tell the difference visually, but there was a slight performance improvement.

As for the FXAA injector mod, I haven't tried that - the screenshots I've seen look like the saturation is way off and it seems to give everything an overbearing yellow or bluish tint. The vanilla game looks much better than that mod IMHO.

vsync is intended to prevent screen tearing by capping your frame rate at 60fps (the refresh rate of your laptop display or monitor). When I disabled it in the ini file, my frame rate improved a bit and I have only seen screen tearing a couple of times over the course of 150+ hours playing the game. It was very brief, IIRC I was panning from right to left in first person view and there was a single tear that quickly disappeared.

The preferences command to disable vsync does not go in the SkyrimPrefs.ini file, but in the Skyrim.ini file. I believe you need to add the following line in the display section: "iPresentInterval=0"

 

I've been playing now with a low but very stable OC in my G73SW (only 776 core / 1289 memory). My max GPU temp. is from 74-76*C after 2 hrs.

This is my setting. No moded ini and didn't bother touching view distance.
View attachment 73032


Screenshots. View at 100% Browser zoom for real size and detail.
http://img32.imageshack.us/img32/7707/tesv2011112502084841.jpg
http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/9357/tesv2011112501500880.jpg
http://img847.imageshack.us/img847/7063/tesv2011112502235409.jpg
http://img141.imageshack.us/img141/9263/tesv2011112404573347.jpg
http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/8670/tesv2011112404591472.jpg

..this game is not ugly..

 

I seem to have fixed my crashing problems. It appears to have been related to the number of save games I had (over 200).

 

I've witnessed something weird (or at least something that I didn't think was possible). A small group of animals were attacking me (ice wolves I think) and while defending myself, a dragon landed next to me. He killed the wolves and then took to the air again without attacking me.

 

Radiant AI is cool huh?

It's even more awesome when a Giant beats a dragon's head in.

 

Steam update destroyed your modified .exe. Now Skyrim does a check to make sure your .exe isn't modified.

4GB Skyrim at Skyrim Nexus - Skyrim Mods and community

Here is a mod that will load Skyrim with the LAA mod, without having to mod the .exe.

 

I'm already using this

 

Skyrim HD - 2K textures. Looks gorgeous. Console version is nothing compared to PC now
One important thing though: The maker of this mod have replaced some of the textures with a different one. Like the road textures or the roof tiles. He is working on using the same textures as bethesda provided, only improving it. So keep an eye on this one. He is soon out with v.1.1. Download it here now:
Skyrim HD - 2K Textures at Skyrim Nexus - Skyrim Mods and community

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Gives seal of approval to this one.
It enhances the game while still staying true to the unique game world design.

I also figured out why im so madly addicted to the game.
Its gonna be because of how it resembles all the viking stuff and how the nature looks exacly like out here in Norway.
(And also because of how well made the game is.)

 

Since you are Norwegian, you can also pronounce all those dungeon names that has 20 consonants before a vowel shows up.

 

soo anyone here try to kill a chicken yet...holy , the citizens of skyrim love their chicken, they don't take kindly to chicken killers.

 

I know! Imagine what happens when you attack their cows.... Not good.

 

Skyrim Newbie Mistake #1.

Mistake #2: Don't hit a Giant...

 

Giants are not tough... I was able to kill one under level 11. Its just if you get more than one, or they get close to you.

On another note, for the Skyrim 4GB, do you just download it and always launch skyrim with the skyrim4gb link?