The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Performance and IQ Review @ [H]

Thank you for the write-up, Kyle. Much of the texture quality woes do not surprise me, considering all of the bitching Bethesda has done about supporting the PC as of late. I intend to reward their bitching and sloppy texture work with ZERO of my dollars.
 
Good article, so only couple of issues :)

1) No need to bust your head why SLI underperforms.
2 main threads + bad multithreading = game is CPU limited.
Havok, tree animations, ULTRA shadows - all done on CPU.

2) WTH are you doing introducing FXAA on top of TR SSAA?
I'll tell you what. Killing what little of color saturation this game has,
on top of blurring the image needlessly.
Because I am pretty sure you made a mistake and that middle screenie is MSAA + TR SSAA, and the third is with added FXAA
http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTMyMTgxNzE5NWhZSUJ3N2pJbG5fNl82X2wucG5n


PS
Performance, specular and foliage aliasing wise - SGSSAA is the way to go in Skyrim if you have Nvidia. Even 2x is better then 4xTR. And only a blindo would apply FXAA on top of it :)

Hopefuly Betheseda delivers mulithreading patch so your i7-920 3.6GHz indeed puts many peoples’ minds at ease when it comes to that subject. :p
 
tricky0502 said:
how come no cpu scaling tests? you mention on page five that you may be cpu limited but there is no testing to know for sure.
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This is what I was thinking - I would very much like to see a CPU benchmark of the game.

Specifically, since some sites have noted that even with the Core i5/i7 series, you get about another FPS average per 100mhz core clock, although apparently it only ever really uses 2 threads.

Sounds like this would be a great game to throw the new SB-E at.

Also - I'm DYING to know if hyperthreading has any interaction, here. For example, Battlefield 3 famously gets "stuttery" with hyperthreading enabled. Since Skyrim likes only 2 cores, I'm thinking...I dunno, maybe it wants all of those cores? This might be a game to test hyperthreading 'on' vs hyperthreading 'off' on a 2600K with. And throw the newer Intel and AMD procs in, too.

Been a while since we've had a *game* that was so CPU-limited, might be fun to play around with that, some.
 
Just letting you guys know we've found some great shadow improvements possible in the game through INI tweaks, we'll have all that in our followup article.
 
Brent_Justice said:
Just letting you guys know we've found some great shadow improvements possible in the game through INI tweaks, we'll have all that in our followup article.
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Improvements how? Quality? Performance? Both?

The only tweaks I've seen that do anything are for tree shadows, land shadows, and increasing shadow resolution by shrinking the visible shadow range.

Ritorix said:
Considering how little SLI helps, would breaking up SLI and assigning one GPU to physics processing instead help more?
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Considering the game uses havok, this would do nothing.

Mark_Warner said:
Looks like all 4 cores are engaged to me.
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But what was the average CPU utilization during play? 50%? I'm on a 2600k at 3.4ghz stock and get 25%-26% usage during play and in cities my 580 SLI utilization drops to 25-35% and FPS drops to the low 20's. I'm going to try overclocking tonight to see if it helps.
 
Crest said:
Improvements how? Quality? Performance? Both?

The only tweaks I've seen that do anything are for tree shadows, land shadows, and increasing shadow resolution by shrinking the visible shadow range.
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There are a ton of shadow options if you dive into the ini.

Among other things you can change the shadow map sizes for indoor vs outdoor, how often the sun draws shadows on static objects (default is pretty low), and how long they take to update every interval (whether the sun shadows 'jump' or 'grow').
 
Brent_Justice said:
Just letting you guys know we've found some great shadow improvements possible in the game through INI tweaks, we'll have all that in our followup article.
Click to expand...

Pretty late to the game. The game looks fantastic with FXAA Injector post-processing that was released at Skyrim Nexus a week ago. Better saturation, contrast, shadows, and just a game-changer all around, really.

Other fantastic mods out there that improve water, add sun glare, retexture tree bark, etc. One of the best-looking games you can get now, to be honest.

Also, some of you may have forgotten that the point of playing games is to enjoy games, not jerk off at the graphics. As you can see from my rig, I love the eyecandy more than anyone, but if you're eschewing the game because it doesn't have XYZ bells and whistles, you're missing out big time because this is one of the most amazing, wondrous, and mindblowing games I have ever played. Easily in the top five games of all time for me.

So do yourself a favor and get the game rather than getting self-righteous and angsty. Trust me, one of these is a lot more fun than the other...and Bethesda is hardly alone in following the money and orienting toward consoles in terms of graphics.
 
Of course, there are third party options, our goal is to find out what you can do with what is built-in, and provide IQ and performance information.
 
Matrices said:
Pretty late to the game. The game looks fantastic with FXAA Injector post-processing that was released at Skyrim Nexus a week ago. Better saturation, contrast, shadows, and just a game-changer all around, really.

Other fantastic mods out there that improve water, add sun glare, retexture tree bark, etc. One of the best-looking games you can get now, to be honest.

Also, some of you may have forgotten that the point of playing games is to enjoy games, not jerk off at the graphics. As you can see from my rig, I love the eyecandy more than anyone, but if you're eschewing the game because it doesn't have XYZ bells and whistles, you're missing out big time because this is one of the most amazing, wondrous, and mindblowing games I have ever played. Easily in the top five games of all time for me.

So do yourself a favor and get the game rather than getting self-righteous and angsty. Trust me, one of these is a lot more fun than the other...and Bethesda is hardly alone in following the money and orienting toward consoles in terms of graphics.
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At this point I don't care much about awesome graphics, I care about comparable graphics to current generation games, at the same time, getting playable FPS. I'd yet to get one of those on my system.
 
Also, there is no mystery, the game is CPU-limited and dual-thread limited. Three 580s at 1080p produce slightly lower framerate than single 580 at 1080p just because SLI is unnecessarily being juggled and the cards throttle like there's no tomorrow.
 
Crest said:
At this point I don't care much about awesome graphics, I care about comparable graphics to current generation games, at the same time, getting playable FPS. I'd yet to get one of those on my system.
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What is "playable"? If you are running an AMD Crossfire system, yes, I've read that you are boned unless you physically remove a card, possibly.

However, for most people at 1080p the game is perfectly playable with 6870 or above at Ultra settings or High settings. GPU isn't even a big issue because as I said the game is CPU-limited.

Also this is not Call of Battlefield, you don't need 120 FPS. 40+ FPS is fine. I get 60-80 FPS at 5760 x 1080p everything maxed. Could probably do that with 2 580s rather than 3 because the GPU usage is nowhere near max in 2D mode.

I see you are running Nvidia. Just make sure you have 3D disabled in NCP if you are not running 3D.
 
With FXAA, MSAA, TR SSAA, you get AA on everything, even tr ssaa can't aa specular aliasing

MSAA - polygon edges
TR SSAA - alpha textures
FXAA - specular aliasing

using all of them improves quality on everything to the best you can get right now, and it isn't hard on performance with SLI, the performance is there to allow all of it, doing so puts you in more so of a gpu limited scenerio
 
Matrices said:
What is "playable"? If you are running an AMD Crossfire system, yes, I've read that you are boned unless you physically remove a card, possibly.
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I'm so tired of reading crap like this. This is blatantly false. You can simply run RadeonPro with the Oblivion profile and crossfire works great (this is what I'm doing). You could also drop the fixed dll in your folder, or rename the .exe to fallout3, Crysis.exe etc. (this is the same for NV games that don't have out of the box profiles) Finally if you are really lame you could just disable CF.
 
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Matrices said:
What is "playable"? If you are running an AMD Crossfire system, yes, I've read that you are boned unless you physically remove a card, possibly.

However, for most people at 1080p the game is perfectly playable with 6870 or above at Ultra settings or High settings. GPU isn't even a big issue because as I said the game is CPU-limited.

Also this is not Call of Battlefield, you don't need 120 FPS. 40+ FPS is fine. I get 60-80 FPS at 5760 x 1080p everything maxed. Could probably do that with 2 580s rather than 3 because the GPU usage is nowhere near max in 2D mode.

I see you are running Nvidia. Just make sure you have 3D disabled in NCP if you are not running 3D.
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Playable is over 30 for me. In Whiterun and riverwood I'm at 20-25fps, and the mouse lag is unbelievable at that point. On low I get maybe 32. Also why are you telling me what framerates I should be ok with?

Like I said, I plan on overclocking my 2600k to perhaps 4ghz atleast to test the differences it makes. Because right now I can't play in the cities or in some of the big indoor areas, let alone play and record my Let's Plays for my channel.
 
Crest said:
Playable is over 30 for me. In Whiterun and riverwood I'm at 20-25fps, and the mouse lag is unbelievable at that point. On low I get maybe 32. Also why are you telling me what framerates I should be ok with?

Like I said, I plan on overclocking my 2600k to perhaps 4ghz atleast to test the differences it makes. Because right now I can't play in the cities or in some of the big indoor areas, let alone play and record my Let's Plays for my channel.
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On 580 SLI? Did you disable 3D in Nvidia control panel (not even sure it's there if you don't have 3D, but worth checking)?

Something is jacked up for you, then. If you have a K processor you should be able to OC to at least 4.5 ghz. What do you have it set to now? If it's around 3ghz, that might be the issue.
 
-Sn1PeR- said:
I'm so tired of reading crap like this. This is blatantly false. You can simply run RadeonPro with the Oblivion profile and crossfire works great (this is what I'm doing). You could also drop the fixed dll in your folder, or rename the .exe to fallout3, etc. Finally if you are really lame you could just disable CF.
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Well that's good to know. Try not to get too mad about it though you may not live long enough to experience all the game's content. ;)
 
Mark_Warner said:
CPU usage has not generally been a part of our gameplay performance/iq articles. It used to be, but we didn't learn much and the info wasn't that useful, so we stopped it.

That said, I just checked this out for you. Here is what I found.

Here's my computer idling at the desktop with steam open:

cpu_idle.png


And here it is with skyrim running: (loaded the game, ran around for a minute, and alt-tabbed out to take the screenshot)
cpu_skyrim.png


Looks like all 4 cores are engaged to me.

As a side-note, this game doesn't alt-tab cleanly, and that annoys the crap out of me.
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"All 4 cores engaged" doesn't mean the game is using a lot of threads.

Remember that the OS is what is scheduling tasks. That screenshot is about what I see, and shows well that the game is poorly CPU-optimized. That is, it really is only using a small handful of threads, poorly synchronized, and the OS is simply distributing the threads it is using around the available CPUs.
 
Matrices said:
On 580 SLI? Did you disable 3D in Nvidia control panel (not even sure it's there if you don't have 3D, but worth checking)?

Something is jacked up for you, then. If you have a K processor you should be able to OC to at least 4.5 ghz. What do you have it set to now? If it's around 3ghz, that might be the issue.
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I'm on a ZR30w, 60hz. I've never messed with 3D and performance has yet to be an issue in any other major title.

My 2600k is at 3.4 now(stock), but I plan on atleast sitting at 4ghz for testing purposes.
 
dderidex said:
"All 4 cores engaged" doesn't mean the game is using a lot of threads.

Remember that the OS is what is scheduling tasks. That screenshot is about what I see, and shows well that the game is poorly CPU-optimized. That is, it really is only using a small handful of threads, poorly synchronized, and the OS is simply distributing the threads it is using around the available CPUs.
Click to expand...

I didn't make any assessment about whether or not I believed it was using a lot of threads, nor about how effective its CPU utilization was. I merely showed that it was at least touching them.
 
Brent_Justice said:
With FXAA, MSAA, TR SSAA, you get AA on everything, even tr ssaa can't aa specular aliasing

MSAA - polygon edges
TR SSAA - alpha textures
FXAA - specular aliasing

using all of them improves quality on everything to the best you can get right now, and it isn't hard on performance with SLI, the performance is there to allow all of it, doing so puts you in more so of a gpu limited scenerio
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Depends on a game, but true - TR SSAA is generally fighting foliage, wires aka alpha textures aliasing.
Then again I know for a fact that TR SSAA works full screen and removes specular in Doom 3. So there are AA rules, but there are exceptions to it also

And using FXAA to fight specular does have negatives on overall IQ.
In Skyrim, besides somewhat blurring, it screws colormap
( not 100% sure, because I turned it off asap, but I've seen it destroying colors in enough games)

Tell me that third image here is not the best looking:
http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTMyMTgxNzE5NWhZSUJ3N2pJbG5fNl84X2wucG5n



Also, I have yet to find a game where TR SSAA is better then xS or SGSSAA,

TL;DR more AA and less aliasing does not necessarily mean better picture.

Is the 4th pic not over-softened?
 
Matrices said:
This. "All cores engaged" doesn't have anything to do with CPU threading, that's just the OS load balancing. Unless the cores are being maxed, it's not real threading.

Tom's Hardware already proved that the game is only using two cores:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/skyrim-performance-benchmark,3074-9.html

Look at those numbers. It doesn't get any clearer than that.
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I just wished they'd included a 2600K/2700K in the numbers (I'm dying to know what impact hyperthreading has, given it's detrimental effect on BF3) and/or the new SB-E chips (some other hardware site showing the SB-E having a MASSIVE performance advantage over SB in this game).
 
Mark_Warner said:
CPU usage has not generally been a part of our gameplay performance/iq articles. It used to be, but we didn't learn much and the info wasn't that useful, so we stopped it.

That said, I just checked this out for you. Here is what I found.

*snip

Looks like all 4 cores are engaged to me.

As a side-note, this game doesn't alt-tab cleanly, and that annoys the crap out of me.
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the games not actually the one engaging it, its windows shifting the usage, playing starcraft 2 does the same thing on my processor which we know for a fact is limited to 2 cores but windows will put 60% load on core 0 40% load on core 1 60% load on core 2 and 40% load on core 3. if i manually limit the game to 2 cores both core 0 and 1 sit at 100%. which the performance was exactly the same. the OS balancing is kind of miss leading but eh what can ya do when developers still continue to release core limited games using a physics engine that is has infinite core scaling.


dderidex said:
I just wished they'd included a 2600K/2700K in the numbers (I'm dying to know what impact hyperthreading has, given it's detrimental effect on BF3) and/or the new SB-E chips (some other hardware site showing the SB-E having a MASSIVE performance advantage over SB in this game).
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it has no effect because the game can't use it. the games limited to 2 cores, whether windows shows it using more then 2 cores doesn't really matter. the higher memory bandwidth on SB-E might be giving a slight performance increase but thats it.
 
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Skyrim has 2 main threads,
and OS is just balancing the load across all avilable cores, which is far from using them effectivly.

You will see little difference between 2 and 4 core CPU performance, and virtually none between 3 and more cores.
Its Red Orchestra 2 all over
 
Thanks for the feedback on the CPU information, this article was a video card performance and IQ article, not a CPU scaling article.
 
Wow, that SLI scaling is awful. CPU-limited or not (which honestly it should not be), they need to get some patches going.
 
Brent_Justice said:
Thanks for the feedback on the CPU information, this article was a video card performance and IQ article, not a CPU scaling article.
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its all good man, i think our bickering was more to keep the people that kept asking for the cpu testing quiet then anything else. review was still good. btw will there be any attempt to revisit AMD testing if/when they release a driver update with a cf cap?
 
Sooo....just wondering about using older hardware with this game, I've got a Q6600 quad clocked to its max of 3.6GHz and two gtx460's 2GB versions in sli clocked to 820MHz.
Is there any way of reducing cpu load in the game? varying levels of physics effects?
Would reducing the "Render ahead" value in the nvidia control panel reduce cpu load?
Any other suggestions?
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
it has no effect because the game can't use it. the games limited to 2 cores, whether windows shows it using more then 2 cores doesn't really matter. the higher memory bandwidth on SB-E might be giving a slight performance increase but thats it.
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Well, my comment was less a suggestion that it would improve things - I'm 100% sure it would not - but that it might have a detrimental effect to have Hyperthreading enabled.

IE., the game wants one or two cores, but it wants them BADLY. Tom's saw a 1fps average increase for every 100mhz clock bump, all the way to 4ghz (where they stopped). That speaks to TREMENDOUS CPU limitation, and the reason I was wondering what the impact would be from the overhead, or presence of 'not exactly real cores', that a hyperthreaded 2600K/2700K has going on.

As to SB-E...well, it's not just memory bandwidth. That chip also has LOT more cache. So another good reason to compare a 2600K (with HT disabled) vs a 2500K...what impact does the cache have?

(And, for that matter - AMD's bulldozer, while otherwise a turd, does have a HECK of a lot of cache. If Skyrim is really that gasping-for-air-desperate for CPU cache...uhhh...maybe?)

The long and short of the recent discussion on CPUs is simply that I think this would be a valuable title to run through [H]'s set of review chips. It's the first game in a long time that has demonstrated any major CPU throttling, so...would be interesting to see how the modern chips compare!
 
Brent_Justice said:
Thanks for the feedback on the CPU information, this article was a video card performance and IQ article, not a CPU scaling article.
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i understand that this isnt a cpu article, but when the cpu is limiting the performance of the gpu it kinda becomes a factor.
 
technogiant said:
Sooo....just wondering about using older hardware with this game, I've got a Q6600 quad clocked to its max of 3.6GHz and two gtx460's 2GB versions in sli clocked to 820MHz.
Is there any way of reducing cpu load in the game? varying levels of physics effects?
Would reducing the "Render ahead" value in the nvidia control panel reduce cpu load?
Any other suggestions?
Click to expand...

Kill shadows to medium or lower , customize the .ini file (check for yourself the performance hit u get from each lvl of shadows). Modify the shadows so they are crisper closer and less jagged.


bTreesReceiveShadows=1
bDrawLandShadows=1
iShadowMapResolutionSecondary=4096 <---- u can change 4096 to 3000 or 2048
iShadowMapResolutionPrimary=4096
iBlurDeferredShadowMask=3
bFloatPointRenderTarget=1
iShadowMapResolution=4096

i have it at 2048

For “shaking” or “twitching” shadows, set

iBlurDeferredShadowMask=0
iShadowMaskQuarter=0
 
maboblivion said:
Kill shadows to medium or lower , customize the .ini file (check for yourself the performance hit u get from each lvl of shadows). Modify the shadows so they are crisper closer and less jagged.


bTreesReceiveShadows=1
bDrawLandShadows=1
iShadowMapResolutionSecondary=4096 <---- u can change 4096 to 3000 or 2048
iShadowMapResolutionPrimary=4096
iBlurDeferredShadowMask=3
bFloatPointRenderTarget=1
iShadowMapResolution=4096

i have it at 2048

For &#8220;shaking&#8221; or &#8220;twitching&#8221; shadows, set

iBlurDeferredShadowMask=0
iShadowMaskQuarter=0
Click to expand...

Thank you :)... and these tweaks will reduce cpu load?......I've got quite a bit of gpu grunt for 1920X1200 but I'm a little weak on the cpu front.
 
Game runs great on my sig rig. No complaints at all.

On another note - the front page of the article mentions a horse. Please let me know if this is true...i've been running by foot for HOURS
 
fenixv said:
Game runs great on my sig rig. No complaints at all.

On another note - the front page of the article mentions a horse. Please let me know if this is true...i've been running by foot for HOURS
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You can buy a horse from most stables for ~1,000-gold. There is also at least one available through a quest line.

Running great here too! Love this game. Gorgeous in eyefinity!
 
This doesn't relate to single screens, but for those using multi-monitor, you should know you have to run a separate hack to get the UI menu readable (link). Otherwise, it's zoomed in and much of the interface is inaccessible. This is something Bethesda has left to "the PC community" to fix and may not ever be officially patched. Props to WSGF for working on solutions non-stop since Skyrim launched.

Is anyone having problems forcing ambient occlusion on (via NVIDIA Inspector) after ForceWare 285.79? I don't even get the compatibility option for Fallout3 or Oblivion any more. To be sure, SSAO in this game sucks up a lot of performance (at least with the nicer Fallout3 compatibility settings, not so much with the lighter Oblivion settings). I also had a ton more crashes using it, but when it works, it's SO worth it! The game just looks much nicer and deeper with SSAO, whether running over the tundra or dungeon crawling.

(Using GTX 580 3GB SLI, Core i7-950)
 
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