Skyrim impressions

Thats crazy, my 2600k and 6950 handle everythingf this game has thrown at it. Surely there's not that large of a disparity between the 2500 and the 2600?
 
IsaacMM said:
It's absurd that I had to buy a new cooler so I could OC my CPU because apparently my GTX 580 and 2500k at stock cannot handle Skyrim at 1920x1200 with everything maxed.
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there must be somthing wrong with a driver or somthing cause i have a 2600k at stock with the stock cooler, and a gtx280 at stock and i got 16gigs of ram and i know skyrim does not use all of that lol. i have all settins at max at 1920x1200 and i have had no problems what so ever the 2500k is a great chip there should be no reason you cant run it every thing at max

must be a driver or somthign else take a good look at your system man
 
IsaacMM said:
What? If the game is CPU limited, overclocking it will obviously help.
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Didn't say it wouldn't help at all, but some people have reported it didn't improve the lag when in towns. It looks like the game engine isn't optimized very well.

From Tweakguides:
In terms of performance, there are a wide range of tradeoffs, tips and recommendations I have in the guide, but let's be clear: Skyrim is a CPU-limited game, which is why there are slowdowns in certain areas.
Click to expand...
 
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I've got a 2500K and a 6950. I run the game at maximum, with shadow tweaks and such turned on with minimal slowdown. I occaisionall get some slow-downs here and there, especially after alt-tabbing back into the game.

I've noticed minimal to no difference between my 2500K at stock and at 4,3 Ghz.
 
Krieger91 said:
Son of a bitch this damned Blood Dragon won't leave me alone anytime I go near Makrath, I am on Master and he will kill me in almost one flame burst. Shits hard.
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Yeah I found him last night, I assumed it was a random encounter at first like the others and was really irate after finding him so hard, I guess he's patrolling that specific area since we both ran into him in the same place, probably a unique encounter of some description which would explain the difficulty. It's a potion-chugger for sure, I was entirely decked out in Glass armour a 4 piece set all upgraded to (Epic) and with 20% frost resist potion active he was still doing over 50% of my health per attack.

And as usual you can't hide behind anything to avoid the attack, you can't dodge or outrun it (the flame, not the pulse), and I can't hide from him as a rogue, so basically you have to attempt to kite him with arrows, only the frost breath has this ridiculous range. Oh and you can't block with a bow so you get pwned by it. Basically it's fire 2 arrows, get prawned, chug potions back to full health, rinse and repeat, it's really a lame fight to be honest, no tactics just chugging like freshers week in a brewery.

IsaacMM said:
It's absurd that I had to buy a new cooler so I could OC my CPU because apparently my GTX 580 and 2500k at stock cannot handle Skyrim at 1920x1200 with everything maxed.
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That can't be right, the 580 can handle 2560x1600 maxed so it's not the card, and my 2600k is more than enough to max the game and the 2500k is almost identical, there must be some bug here. Run the game for a few mins, then alt tab and check graphs for CPU and GPU usage.

dark_reign said:
Haven't bought the game yet, but I know the game is CPU limited. Overclocking won't help much.
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In regard to this...

dark_reign said:
Didn't say it wouldn't help at all, but some people have reported it didn't improve the lag when in towns. It looks like the game engine isn't optimized very well.

From Tweakguides:
In terms of performance, there are a wide range of tradeoffs, tips and recommendations I have in the guide, but let's be clear: Skyrim is a CPU-limited game, which is why there are slowdowns in certain areas.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

...and this:

First of all if you're CPU limited and you overclock your CPU that's exactly what will help, being CPU limited means your CPU is maxed out and is the slowest components in the PC, so making it faster will increase performance. Only if you're GPU limited and you increase your CPU speed will you see no benefit.

Let's get something straight right off the bat, the bottleneck for the game game depends entirely on what hardware you have and what settings you chose to use. If you have something like a 5770 and a 2600k and you try and run the game in 3x1 eyefinity at 5760x1200 with Ultra settings your GPU is going to struggle and run at about 1fps so you'll be GPU limited.

Conversely if you have a GTX 580 and an old single core Pentium 4, and you're running in 1280x1024 with all settings on low then you'll be CPU limited.

I suspect a LOT of the performance issues people are having are with Vsync forced on, the degradation in frame rate when your card fails to render at 60fps can be quite bad, it's going to plummet straight to 30fps. I'd suggest people try disabling that and see how you go, edit the skyrim ini file in your

C:\Users\<YOUR USERNAME>\Documents\My Games\Skyrim\

Edit the Skyrimprefs.ini file and under the [Display] section change

iPresentInterval=1

to

iPresentInterval=0

If it doesn't exist then just add it at the end of that section. That will disable vsync and stop your frame rate from drastically dropping, if you want to undo the change just set it back to =1 to enable vsync again.
 
PrincessFrosty said:
First of all if you're CPU limited and you overclock your CPU that's exactly what will help, being CPU limited means your CPU is maxed out and is the slowest components in the PC, so making it faster will increase performance. Only if you're GPU limited and you increase your CPU speed will you see no benefit.
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Sure it will, but it depends a lot on the game. If it's poorly optimized you won't see any considerable benefit. Tom's Hardware does show a 10 fps boost when overclocking an i5-2500k from 3 GHz to 4 GHz. I don't see this making a huge difference, but every little bit helps.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/skyrim-performance-benchmark,3074-9.html
 
If you guys are having trouble with dragons, get the sword Dragonsbane from Sky Haven Temple. Mine does 29 damage and 40 extra damage to dragons, so it does 69 damage per hit. It takes 7-8 swings to bring down a dragon. The hard part is surviving until they land.

I'm really loving this game. It's been a while since I've been able to sit down and play a game for hours and feel like I've only been playing for a little while..
 
How to lose at Skyrim:

1) Create super-stealthy Rogue McArcher.
2) Acquire companion.
3) Enter cave.
4) Ascend to top level.
5) Pull out bow and get ready to attack Boss.
6) Get pushed off the ledge by your companion.
7) Die from fall damage.
8) Realize the last save was when you zoned in to the cave.
9) Ragequit.

Optional:
10) Realize that you've not moved in 11 hours, and you're actually a little hungry.

Love this game. There's a few issues, but the only things I really want changed are the companion clipping, the UI, and the low-res textures.
 
TeeJayHoward said:
Love this game. There's a few issues, but the only things I really want changed are the companion clipping, the UI, and the low-res textures.
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Yes, companions can be extremely annoying. They always seem to stand RIGHT in the doorway, and won't move until you shove on them for a while.. then they complain that you pushed them.. lol
 
dark_reign said:
Sure it will, but it depends a lot on the game. If it's poorly optimized you won't see any considerable benefit. Tom's Hardware does show a 10 fps boost when overclocking an i5-2500k from 3 GHz to 4 GHz. I don't see this making a huge difference, but every little bit helps.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/skyrim-performance-benchmark,3074-9.html
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Of course it does depend on optimization. Skyrim doesn't use more than 2 threads which is a massive waste of power, for quad cores it leaves approximately 50% of the CPU idle.

Still, what it does with those 2 cores hasn't really been demonstrated to be unoptimized as such, people just need to be careful with that word.
 
PrincessFrosty said:
Of course it does depend on optimization. Skyrim doesn't use more than 2 threads which is a massive waste of power, for quad cores it leaves approximately 50% of the CPU idle.

Still, what it does with those 2 cores hasn't really been demonstrated to be unoptimized as such, people just need to be careful with that word.
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I'm pretty sure that it actually does use all 4 cores.. This post has a screenshot of someone's task manager, and it shows that only one core was used before the game was launched, and all 4 cores are being used after the game was launched.
 
simonizor said:
I'm pretty sure that it actually does use all 4 cores.. This post has a screenshot of someone's task manager, and it shows that only one core was used before the game was launched, and all 4 cores are being used after the game was launched.
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You're right, I was parroting what I read elsewhere without actually checking it on my own rig, I will test this on my 2600k when I get home tonight and confirm either way.
 
Had a blood dragon attack Winterhold last night while all the mages from the college were outside for a story event. Gigantic spell battle!

I'm thinking dragons need a dragonfear effect. Auto-fear all the normal citizens and some guards, at least keeping them out of melee where they just run into my ranged attacks. By the time i killed one in Dawnstar last night half the town had joined the battle. NPCs should be running in terror, I'm supposed to be the hero here! :p
 
simonizor said:
Yes, companions can be extremely annoying. They always seem to stand RIGHT in the doorway, and won't move until you shove on them for a while.. then they complain that you pushed them.. lol
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I'm finding, as a stealthy rouge assassin, that companions are more annoying than helpful to me. I prefer to be a lone wolf, as the companions are little more than pack-mules for me.
 
IsaacMM said:
It's absurd that I had to buy a new cooler so I could OC my CPU because apparently my GTX 580 and 2500k at stock cannot handle Skyrim at 1920x1200 with everything maxed.
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As others have been saying, your issue is elsewhere. 2600k GTX580 here. Runs 60+ FPS with no AA at 1920x1200. Reason for no AA is that at this res(and higher) you really have to be looking to notice the jaggies while everything is in motion. Waste of resources imo.
 
Inate8 said:
As others have been saying, your issue is elsewhere. 2600k GTX580 here. Runs 60+ FPS with no AA at 1920x1200. Reason for no AA is that at this res(and higher) you really have to be looking to notice the jaggies while everything is in motion. Waste of resources imo.
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Would this account for why I lose some fps when I'm in caves? For some reason, it gets a bit choppy
 
Splinter24 said:
I'm finding, as a stealthy rouge assassin, that companions are more annoying than helpful to me. I prefer to be a lone wolf, as the companions are little more than pack-mules for me.
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Heh, I got the pickpocket perk for my assassin last night an extra 100 carry space takes me up to just shy of 500 total which is more than enough, by that point in the game I have full glass armour (epic) and about 35k gold, I've stopped picking up stuff now I just grab items with specifically high value to weight ratios, most of the armour and weapons just doesn't fetch enough for its weight even with high speech.

Still I need to drop the 25k + 10k on the house in Solitude though so I better keep saving!

13 points off 100 in smithing as well, so dragon armour is just around the corner :)
 
Splinter24 said:
Would this account for why I lose some fps when I'm in caves? For some reason, it gets a bit choppy
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It shouldn't do to be honest, AA is a fairly predictable frame rate drop compared to no-AA and generally speaking isn't very scene dependent so you'd expect a roughly equal drop no matter where you area.

I did notice 1-2 dungeons for me had troublesome areas where frame rate could drop quite a lot, back when I had my unstable 5970 I was getting rendering artefacts and in a couple of the dungeons and the whole dungeons were rendering and FPS was plummeting, it makes me wonder if some dungeons aren't culling correctly in places, anyone know a wireframe command for the console? With that we could test that theory easily.

*edit*

Wireframe mode is just "twf" in console without quote marks, try that in a dungeon with really bad FPS and see if the whole dungoen (or a lot of it) is rendering even when you can't see those parts. I'll do the same when i stumble across problematic areas, it's a fairly rare problem for me though.
 
I've been to busy playing to mess with the interface at all and while assigning a spell to a hand is cool is it possible to either use a hotkey to use an assigned spell or make a generic "use selected spell" button?

Basically I would prefer it worked like Oblivion where you could equip say a sword and a shield and then have a spell slot as well.
 
It feels like Fallout 3.

Which is a good thing to me, I played the shit out of Fallout 3
 
The way the hotkeys work makes sense if you dual-wield a lot. Its nice being able to hit '3' twice to get double healing, or hit it just once to keep your right hand the same and heal with the left.

Playing a pure mage I have to swap a bunch of spells pretty rapidly. Fear, Calm, Frenzy, a summon, two buffs, a nuke. Some get cast double-handed if I have enough mana, sometimes I dont have enough, whatever. The versatility is nice.
 
OK this is an image of my desktop running task manager and afterburner for CPU and GPU usage, my GPU is at 99% and my CPU is using 4 cores, it's about 50% usage across all cores on average.

http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/1104/82657932.jpg

Everything is at stock right now, specs in sig.

Settings used are 2560x1600 4xAA, 16xAF Ultra settings. Customized with 95 FOV and Vsync is forced off. I was getting about 50-60 FPS outside and about 70 inside. I'm currently I'm Morthal a small town, it was night and I was just wandering around the town hall for a bit, transitioning inside to see the Jarl and talking to a few people.

So I'm clearly GPU limited with these settings.
 
DarkStar_WNY said:
I've been to busy playing to mess with the interface at all and while assigning a spell to a hand is cool is it possible to either use a hotkey to use an assigned spell or make a generic "use selected spell" button?

Basically I would prefer it worked like Oblivion where you could equip say a sword and a shield and then have a spell slot as well.
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Not without modifying the game. Bethesda made it work that way intentionally. It makes if feel more like you're actually casting a spell instead of coming out of nowhere.
 
simonizor said:
Not without modifying the game. Bethesda made it work that way intentionally. It makes if feel more like you're actually casting a spell instead of coming out of nowhere.
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Yeah, I was afraid of that as I'd rather double wield or single with a shield and have the spells come out of nowhere. :D
 
PrincessFrosty said:
OK this is an image of my desktop running task manager and afterburner for CPU and GPU usage, my GPU is at 99% and my CPU is using 4 cores, it's about 50% usage across all cores on average.
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Task manager isn't exactly the best way to judge cpu usage. It isn't very accurate.
 
I must say that this game overall, is amazing in my opinion. I can't remember the last time I played a game for over 80 hours in one week. Battlefield 3 I have played for around 50 hours since release, and that feels like a lot. So the time spent playing Skyrim has really flown by.

It has it's little bugs and glitches here and there, but I'd still rate the game 10/10 based on the beautiful atmosphere and overall look of the game. Couple that with the great story and almost endless (it feels) quests, and you have the perfect RPG.

I still have to pinch myself when looking at certain areas of Skyrim, because it looks so perfect and beautiful. With everything on Ultra, the added .ini tweaks, some select mods and the ugridstoload set to =7, the game is quite literally breathtaking in parts.

I will be playing this game for a long time to come, I can be certain of that, and with such a fantastic mod community the game feels almost endless.

:)
 
Hi. is there a way to create a hot key where i can toggle between using a bow and arrow to a sword and shield? And also to toggle between a magic ability?

Is it even possible to use one hand with a magic ability and the other hand for a sword?
 
Also, how do u learn or make new magic skills?

Do u need to get special materials? i know that if i want to repair weapons or make new ones, i have to find/buy materials and use a work bench to construct it. i will be doing LOTS of that this time round as i never really got the chance to do so in past oblivion/fallout games
 
Just beat the game in 34 hours as per Steam. I really tried to refrain from doing too much of the main quest line as I could, but I couldn't help going back to it. Like Oblivion though, I'm sure I'll keep playing the game, though probably not with the same fervor that I did these last two weeks. Finished The Thieves Guild quest lines, but not any of the other main ones (Dark Assassin's, Mage's Guild, and ???)
 
Tzzird said:
Finished The Thieves Guild quest lines, but not any of the other main ones (Dark Assassin's, Mage's Guild, and ???)
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Wow, you really haven't experienced much of the game yet. I think you'll find the other guild quests just as enthralling as the main story.
If you finished the main questline before doing the Companions you missed out on a little easter egg (on the final mission). NBD though.
 
Hot keys are a pain you'll have to fiddle and see what works. Basically go in to your items menu, select weapons and then highlight the weapon you want and press the F key to add to favourites menu (same method for spells)

Then press Q in game for faves menu and once that's up hover over the spell/weapon you want and press 1-8 on the keyboard to assign a hotkey. Now you can equip things immediately but the system behaves a little odd since some things are quipped on a single hand it means you can toggle some things on/off and allow combos of any 2x single handed weapons like a torch and a dagger or a spell and a shield

As for crafting, as you level up through the world you'll start finding better and better weapons made with better materials, there's mining seams around the world to mine if you have a pickaxe and animals to kill for pelts, you make leather and smelt ore and combine those things at the forge.

There's 2 lines of armour, one light for rogues and heavy for warriors (robes are seperate for mages I believe), the different lines use different materials.

I believe light armour is something like: Hide -> Leather -> Studded -> Elven -> Scaled -> Glass
and Heavy armour is something like: Iron Plate -> Steel plate -> Orcish -> Dwarven -> Ebony

The strongest armour is dragon bone which you craft from the bones and scales from dragons (so save these up every time you kill a dragon and don't sell em!) you can make both heavy and light versions of that.

Weapons are similar you get weapons for most armour types as well and they're all craftable. using smithing you can also improve weapons and armour to make them stronger using the same materials, as you get better at smithing the improvement you add get better, I recently crafted a full (Epic) glass armour set.
 
Enchanting and Smithing are pretty overpowered (unless you are just wearing robes and attack with nothing but magic, ever). Alchemy is decent as it cannot be powerleveled nearly as quickly as the other two. My first playthrough was just over 50 hours and most of that was just doing sidequests. My 2nd time is approaching 30 hours but I did the DB and Thieves guild quests without touching the main quests other then reaching the throat of the world point.

I am now finally getting bored of the game (not a bad thing since I put over 80 hours combined into it) and I think I will stop playing till some serious DLC/Expansions are released.
 
PrincessFrosty said:
Hot keys are a pain you'll have to fiddle and see what works. Basically go in to your items menu, select weapons and then highlight the weapon you want and press the F key to add to favourites menu (same method for spells)

Then press Q in game for faves menu and once that's up hover over the spell/weapon you want and press 1-8 on the keyboard to assign a hotkey. Now you can equip things immediately but the system behaves a little odd since some things are quipped on a single hand it means you can toggle some things on/off and allow combos of any 2x single handed weapons like a torch and a dagger or a spell and a shield

As for crafting, as you level up through the world you'll start finding better and better weapons made with better materials, there's mining seams around the world to mine if you have a pickaxe and animals to kill for pelts, you make leather and smelt ore and combine those things at the forge.

There's 2 lines of armour, one light for rogues and heavy for warriors (robes are seperate for mages I believe), the different lines use different materials.

I believe light armour is something like: Hide -> Leather -> Studded -> Elven -> Scaled -> Glass
and Heavy armour is something like: Iron Plate -> Steel plate -> Orcish -> Dwarven -> Ebony

The strongest armour is dragon bone which you craft from the bones and scales from dragons (so save these up every time you kill a dragon and don't sell em!) you can make both heavy and light versions of that.

Weapons are similar you get weapons for most armour types as well and they're all craftable. using smithing you can also improve weapons and armour to make them stronger using the same materials, as you get better at smithing the improvement you add get better, I recently crafted a full (Epic) glass armour set.
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cracking post. thanks
 
Actually, according to Dragon Wikia and other sources it's not the dragon, but Daedra armor that it's the best thing a heavy could work. Though it takes ages to complete and make.

And, according to the screenshots I seen, Daedra armor looks badass, much better then dragon one ;)
 
hfk said:
Is there any reason(s) a pure archer should not use heavy armor?
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Heavy armour has 2 main downsides, it's heavier so takes up more inventory space, also the heavier the armour the harder it is to sneak, most archers are likely to be rogues and sneak about a lot which makes light armour more favorable.

My rogue with high archery skill gets a critical x3 multiplier for sneak attacks with arrows meaning that I can 1 shot all of the basic enemies as long as I remain undetected, it's more effective to sneak and get critical hits and avoid confrontation than to deck yourself out in armour but then get caught sneaking and have a stand off, it's very risk vs reward, if you're good enough at sneaking you can clear entire dungeons without altering anyone.

You can tank with armour as an archer like that if you wish but it's not really a elogant combination, plus it's gonna be a bit silly when you're constantly in fights at melee range using bows/arrows. For pure archer I would always recommend sneaking, that is the rogue way :)

Enchanting and Smithing are pretty overpowered
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My friend maxed both and made dragon armour and used enchanting to buff bow damage +40% on all pieces of armour and you can double enchant with the right perk so he had +40% sneak on all pieces as well. I think he said his total bow damage was about 200 which is absolutely mental. I'm nearly 100 in smithing now and have plenty of stashed dragon parts so should be able to get dragon armour fairly soon. A note on the smithing tree in the skills section, the left branch is all the light armours and the right branch is all the heavy armours, so invest in the branch that suits your character, you can reach dragon armour via both branches equally.

*edit*

Oh Deadra armour is the 2nd to last perk in the heavy (right) tree in smithing, well that's pretty gay actually because not only is Daedric armour better but lower in the tree (so needing less skill to craft) but also there is both heavy and light variants of the dragon armour where as Daedric armour is heavy only.

Although dragon bone is unique in that you cannot create weapons with it, only armour, so if you want to smith the best weapons in the game you NEED to invest in the heavy branch of the smithing tree, even if you don't intend to use all the heavy armours. That screws over the rouges quite nicely then :rolleyes:
 
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PrincessFrosty said:
Heavy armour has 2 main downsides, it's heavier so takes up more inventory space, also the heavier the armour the harder it is to sneak, most archers are likely to be rogues and sneak about a lot which makes light armour more favorable.

My rogue with high archery skill gets a critical x3 multiplier for sneak attacks with arrows meaning that I can 1 shot all of the basic enemies as long as I remain undetected, it's more effective to sneak and get critical hits and avoid confrontation than to deck yourself out in armour but then get caught sneaking and have a stand off, it's very risk vs reward, if you're good enough at sneaking you can clear entire dungeons without altering anyone.

You can tank with armour as an archer like that if you wish but it's not really a elogant combination, plus it's gonna be a bit silly when you're constantly in fights at melee range using bows/arrows. For pure archer I would always recommend sneaking, that is the rogue way :)



My friend maxed both and made dragon armour and used enchanting to buff bow damage +40% on all pieces of armour and you can double enchant with the right perk so he had +40% sneak on all pieces as well. I think he said his total bow damage was about 200 which is absolutely mental. I'm nearly 100 in smithing now and have plenty of stashed dragon parts so should be able to get dragon armour fairly soon. A note on the smithing tree in the skills section, the left branch is all the light armours and the right branch is all the heavy armours, so invest in the branch that suits your character, you can reach dragon armour via both branches equally.

*edit*

Oh Deadra armour is the 2nd to last perk in the heavy (right) tree in smithing, well that's pretty gay actually because not only is Daedric armour better but lower in the tree (so needing less skill to craft) but also there is both heavy and light variants of the dragon armour where as Daedric armour is heavy only.

Although dragon bone is unique in that you cannot create weapons with it, only armour, so if you want to smith the best weapons in the game you NEED to invest in the heavy branch of the smithing tree, even if you don't intend to use all the heavy armours. That screws over the rouges quite nicely then :rolleyes:
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Shit I'm doing it all wrong lol.. rerolling unless its possible to buy perk reallocation somewhere?
 
jonneymendoza said:
Also, how do u learn or make new magic skills?

Do u need to get special materials?
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This is the first Elder Scrolls game I've played where you can not make your own spells. The only way to learn a spell is to read a book known as a spell tome. These are dropped by certain enemies and located in dungeons throughout the game. The Mage's college in Winterhold can also sell you some.
 
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