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

technogiant said:
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.
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Making shadows look better with almost no performance hit. (compared from going high to ultra) shadows on tree is mostly cosmetic makes it look more pretty :p
 
ported said:
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.
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Someone over on the eVGA forums said that ambient occlusion is still working, you just need to update nVidia inspector to a newer version or something?

I'm not sure, I'm still running the WHQLs.
 
Brent_Justice said:
^ We saw CPU affecting game performance with multi-GPUs at 3 GPUs and upwards, in multi-display. Not at dual-GPU. Read the title of that article ;)
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Anyway you guys could try the new performance AMD beta driver they released?

It adds custom profiles for games to help with crossfire. I now have my 6990 accually working with both gpu's at 99% with 8xSSAA going.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=354402

I used a custom profile with AFR friendly on (love the new CCC options now!)
 
DASHlT said:
Anyway you guys could try the new performance AMD beta driver they released?

It adds custom profiles for games to help with crossfire. I now have my 6990 accually working with both gpu's at 99% with 8xSSAA going.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=354402

I used a custom profile with AFR friendly on (love the new CCC options now!)
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AMD hasn't released any such driver, no where on their site, not on the hotfix site, and no emails that a new driver has been released. Not going to use a driver that hasn't been released by AMD and is downloadable for everyone from their website.
 
I'm not really sure where Dual GTX 295's (Quad SLI) fall in terms of todays performance, but in case anyone else is using this setup still I'll chime in. I pre-orded Skyrim almost the day it was available for pre-order months ago, with plans on having a new PC built by the time it was released.

However I never got to build a new PC so on launch day I didn't have anywhere to install it. My coworker let me install it on his old Alienware which has dual GTX295s and 6GB of RAM and one of the Q---- Intel CPUs. I'm only running the game at 1650 x 1050, but it lets me play with ultra settings and 4xAA with Transparency AA as well, at around 50-60fps. I also tweaked the ini file with the suggestions floating around on the internet and used LAA to let the game use over 2GB of memory, which it defiantly looked like it was. Just walking around an inn, taskmgr showed 1GB of usage, not including the load on the GPU I'm guessing.
 
Hmm so how much of a framerate loss you think i'll see with the phenom II 965 @ stock with the HD 6870.
 
aggies11 said:
I think this is it (just saw it posted elsewhere). Haven't had a chance to try it myself.
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/Catalyst1111aperformance.aspx
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Ok, now its official :p

No Skyrim CFX support, however

o Elder Scrolls Skyrim
o Improves performance 2-7% on single GPU configurations
o Resolve corruption seen when enabling Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing on the AMD Radeon HD 6970 Series
o Disables CrossFireX (to resolve negative scaling and image quality issues seen when CrossFireX is enabled)
 AMD is continuing to work on a CrossFireX solution for Skyrim – as soon as it’s ready we’ll make it publicly available
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I don't see anything that really needs re-testing, 2-7% single-GPU performance improvement isn't going to give you any better playable settings, it already plays very well on single-gpu.
 
kcthebrewer said:
I don't think 2-7% performance increases and still no Crossfire is worth even looking into...

I am beginning to wonder about AMD and their driver team... :(
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Well i had 10.9 before installing skyrim then i installed 11.10 and didn t stop the crashing.
Found a fix to my 2 core issue in xp with compatibility mode and performance was stable around 45 fps but some slight fps noticeable dips. 11.11a actualy brings increases to skyrim compared to 11.11 and previous.

Just tried it and put cat AI to advance and it feels more fluid in my range of fps, a noticeable difference. (1-7 % might not be worth re-benching). Tho i won't try without compatibility mode till patch 1.2

cat 11.11a from amd site is 195mb ?


That Leaked 11.2 seems to intergrate caps profiles with no avivo or dx11 multi-threading.
 
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There are some great mods I hope Brent includes in the follow up review. High quality texture packs are coming out and replacing more and more of the game's out-of-box options and the FXAA injector does a lot towards making the game look better overall. This isn't meant as an excuse for the devs not focusing more on the PC, but the mods do make up for some of the areas they chose not to focus on.
 
I don't know guys. I think that when you re-visit Helgen, and go through the dungeon to get out like you did at the beginning, is the most intense part of the game graphically. My GPU just died at that part due to all the fog. It pegged my GPU @ 99% utilization. I haven't noticed anywhere else in the game where it got that bad.
 
The GTX 560 Ti Twin Frozr I just in my loungeroom machine doesn't really have a problem with this game, however the Q6600 it runs with is definitely bogging this game down in the towns.
 
New Steam update forces steam to be run when using tesv.exe >.>

I ll wait for patch 1.2 on the 28th before loging on and making sure patch fixes my crashes.
 
Kor said:
The GTX 560 Ti Twin Frozr I just in my loungeroom machine doesn't really have a problem with this game, however the Q6600 it runs with is definitely bogging this game down in the towns.
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So this is basically a poorly coded game that only makes use of 2 cpu cores even though it uses cpu physics and its graphics are two generations old??

Good game play or not should this company really be rewarded for their "efforts" on the pc version with our cash?

Whatever happened to "bullet" gpu physics via OpenCl and all the jam tomorrow that AMD was promising?
 
Any idea why after installing a new AMD driver the textures would all of a sudden turn to crap? Here's two screenshots showing what I mean

BEFORE: http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197989882726/screenshot/595828491724874384
AF25359574375D6233AC9112F6D717EC83D71052


SAME NPC, AFTER: http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197989882726/screenshot/595828491724865924
69A4954472967092A6D5AC2535F7BB55A84AA7BD


I have not changed anything besides the GPU driver, I don't know if this could have anything to do with yesterday's patch...
 
Anyone using a 5870 w/this game? If so, how is it playing? I was gonna get another 5870 for xfire, but they seemed to have nixed that. :mad:
 
I use a HD6950 which is marginally faster than a 5870, and I have no problems with running it in 1080p with FXAA and the relevant eye candy turned up. (High/Ultra where possible, grass distance at max and so on). Framerate never dips below anything that could be considered (by me) not playable.
 
5870 is plenty enough to play this game on 1080p. I play with a 6950@5960x1080 with ultra settings no problem.

A good test for finding out good GPU/CPU balance is to go to Dragonsreach stairs and looking down on Whiterun, the scene is quite taxing on both CPU and GPU. Then just adjust your settings so that GPU usage is close to 100% and CPU usage close to 50% (if you're using a quad core, 100% if dual core) and of course you should get framerates you would be happy using all the time. That way you get good balanced performance instead of wide fluctuations.
 
Nice write up but I have to disagree with this;

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim falls into the category of games sporting brilliant gameplay backed by compelling writing, but which also have graphics that ultimately let the rest of the game down.
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While your point of this game not being up to the capabilities of todays hardware I think we have seen a trend that this game bucks nicely. To many of the games that have managed to reach for higher levels of graphics have done so without ANY of the depth that Skyrim has delivered. In fact Skyrim, based on your conclusions, does something I wish more games would do. They focused on the sotry and gameplay first.

Eyecandy is great but a crappy story is still crappy even if it looks pretty. Now in an ideal world we could have both and we all wish that was so but I will gladly trade some graphically options and capability for the game this has delivered.
 
Some of the texture quality is unacceptable, in our followup, we've got some more texture shots showing the very mixed texture qualities you can find in this game.
 
I honestly don't really care if the texture quality isn't up to snuff, because this is a bethesda game. Someone in the mod community will make high res textures of every single texture in the entire game and replace them in one huge mod.
 
Great image quality & performance analysis here guys!

I particularly appreciate the mixed AA mode comparisons, which do a great job of showing which specific AA routine works where and how well.

I personally have avoided FXAA because it blurs the entire image a bit, which is not a satisfactory trade-off for the "snow anti-aliasing" (is this a first? LOL). When the textures are already made for 512 meg (or less) graphics cards you *definitely* dont want to blur them any further through post-processing.

The transparency SSAA through nVidia control panel looks fantastic on foliage, and you can clearly see that there is more detail using this instead of FXAA, as well. It would be nice if TRSSAA could be applied to the snow accumulation also.. running FXAA simply for this reason is pretty lame.

This article also reminds me of why so many people steer clear from PC's in the first place, trying to not only learn all the different functions and effects of your graphics card, but also having to learn about the different types of AA and how to apply them properly in a game to take advantage of your hardware properly is simply a pain in the ass. A unified standard needs to come around that can intelligently apply AA in the places where it needs to be without fiddling with all of this crap.
 
Brent_Justice said:
Some of the texture quality is unacceptable, in our followup, we've got some more texture shots showing the very mixed texture qualities you can find in this game.
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Textures will be fixed by the mod community. It's lame we have to deal with that, but Qarl's Texture Pack for Oblivion was an epiphany, I'm sure we'll have something similar, here.

As to the engine - well, a lot of low-poly models, too, which is a damn shame. Some DX11 tessellation would have been nice, but it's a pure console port, so why would we expect that?

Still - the lighting, once .ini tweaks and nVidia inspector (ambient occlusion) tweaks are done, is impressive enough. The game definitely does come out better looking than 'Fallout 3'...even if not quite 'contemporary'. And it's certainly got a style to it. DX:HR had many of the same criticisms. Still a decent looking game, even if not quite up to current standards.

(Still, at least that HAD tessellation as an option, and considerably better textures, so...definitely a better example of 'how to do a console port properly')
 
With those new ATi 11.11a hot fix drivers, I like the way they fixed the crossfire issues... they turned them OFF!!! :rolleyes:

Seriously??!! They turned crossfire off??!!

I swear, next gaming rig upgrade I'm going team green. At least nVidia had their drivers ready by release day.
 
[H],

Did you guys notice any stuttering on the 6970 like you did at release? If you mostly benchmarked outdoor areas this time, I bet you didn't see it. But I still get bizarre stutter (framerate jumping between 60 and 59 fps but feels like half that) with certain indoor lighting and smoke effects.

We discussed it in another thread. Framerate limiters seemed to help a bit. I'd love if you guys could take a better look at it, because it seems like with this generation of ATI, I get stuttering in half the games I play!
 
Ripperjack said:
With those new ATi 11.11a hot fix drivers, I like the way they fixed the crossfire issues... they turned them OFF!!! :rolleyes:

Seriously??!! They turned crossfire off??!!

I swear, next gaming rig upgrade I'm going team green. At least nVidia had their drivers ready by release day.
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Typical.
 
Tim James said:
[H],

Did you guys notice any stuttering on the 6970 like you did at release? If you mostly benchmarked outdoor areas this time, I bet you didn't see it. But I still get bizarre stutter (framerate jumping between 60 and 59 fps but feels like half that) with certain indoor lighting and smoke effects.

We discussed it in another thread. Framerate limiters seemed to help a bit. I'd love if you guys could take a better look at it, because it seems like with this generation of ATI, I get stuttering in half the games I play!
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Have you tried to run the game in windowed mode to see if it'll get smoother? I posted about this in another thread: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1653449

I was hoping to get some more feedback about whether this is another 64hz Bethesda bug or not.
 
kooda said:
Anyone using a 5870 w/this game? If so, how is it playing? I was gonna get another 5870 for xfire, but they seemed to have nixed that. :mad:
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I'm using a 5850 eyefinity setup... 3240*1920 at medium settings, and am getting playable fps.
 
So I borrowed a GTX 560 Ti from a friend to compare to my Radeon 5850 to see if an upgrade would be worth it or not. I'm forced to conclude "no." While the performance of the 560 is betterish overall, it's not significant enough to warrant spending the money.

Granted, it does "feel" better/less buggy, but for some reason I get MASSIVE performance drops in certain dungeon and shop areas... seems to be related to fog effects and/or heat shimmer/multiple light sources. We're talking low 30's fps here, which with vsync enabled is HORRIBLY laggy. I don't experience this with the 5850, performance stays in the 45-50 fps range in the same areas with the same settings. Problem disappears when using the "High" preset, but I haven't bothered figuring out exactly which setting is causing the 560 to choke up (I normally play on Ultra, 4x/16x, FXAA, object detail fade enabled, 1920x1080)

Anyone else experience this?
 
Does anyone have any good shots to show what the Radial Blur setting does?

@DukeNukem:

I would try the following. Go into your My Documents\My Games\Skyrim folder and rename the following files to .old:

RenderInfo.txt
Skyrim.ini
SkyrimPrefs.ini

Then run the launcher. It will detect your video card and recreate those files. Adjust your settings at that point. Also, make sure all of your settings in your in CCC are set to Use Application settings.
 
Sabrewulf165 said:
So I borrowed a GTX 560 Ti from a friend to compare to my Radeon 5850 to see if an upgrade would be worth it or not. I'm forced to conclude "no." While the performance of the 560 is betterish overall, it's not significant enough to warrant spending the money.

Granted, it does "feel" better/less buggy, but for some reason I get MASSIVE performance drops in certain dungeon and shop areas... seems to be related to fog effects and/or heat shimmer/multiple light sources. We're talking low 30's fps here, which with vsync enabled is HORRIBLY laggy. I don't experience this with the 5850, performance stays in the 45-50 fps range in the same areas with the same settings. Problem disappears when using the "High" preset, but I haven't bothered figuring out exactly which setting is causing the 560 to choke up (I normally play on Ultra, 4x/16x, FXAA, object detail fade enabled, 1920x1080)

Anyone else experience this?
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Well, the big reason to go green with this title is the Ambient Occlusion settings. That's a game changer, and only nVidia can do that.

As to the slowdowns - I haven't experienced that (I also have a 560 Ti), but it may be due to AA levels. I don't use MSAA at all, just sticking with FXAA.
 
Any game made across all gaming platforms but PC Platform not their Priority, you'll have poor textures lighting and shadows. I expected that also expected shadows done via CPU because of Consoles inferior GPUs cannot handle them, not to the level a PC graphics can handle anyways. It's the sad truth. Luckily this game can easily be modded for better textures etc etc and I'll await them Mods.
 
Ripperjack said:
With those new ATi 11.11a hot fix drivers, I like the way they fixed the crossfire issues... they turned them OFF!!! :rolleyes:

Seriously??!! They turned crossfire off??!!

I swear, next gaming rig upgrade I'm going team green. At least nVidia had their drivers ready by release day.
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Just grab the 12.1 drivers. They let you make custom crossfire profiles. No need for caps anymore.

LEts me run skyrim with 4xSSAA running and its smooth as shit. Both gpu's at 99%

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=354402
 
Need help.

Im running SLI 3gb 580's overclocked to 900mhz, i72600k @ 4.8ghz (Hyperthreading off), 8gb ram, latest nvidia drivers - 285.79

Run Skyrim at 2560x1440, all settings DNA extreme ini tweak, all in-game settings ultra, fxaa injector tweak preset1, NO msaa at all..and I cant maintain 60fps 100% of the time..it was starting to drop to high 40's (which I didnt mind)..but certain times it got down below 30 (which i don't like at all)...In the end to make it run smoother..as in never really below 50fps (so far anyway..not that far into the game)...I had to drop anisotropic filtering to 8x, drop object distance to half to get it to run smoother. Which isn't too bad I rarely notice the object drop off..but it does seriously help the frame rate.

Im only getting 35 - 55% gpu usage in SLI, So i tried all the fancy AA settings etc...and I did get my gpu usage up to 50 - 70%...but it ran worse...and didnt look a whole lot better.

I understand this game isn't a shooter, and I wouldn't have thought the odd frame rate drop would bother me...but it is annoying after going from constant 60fps in bf3 to this on skyrim. Understand game is cpu dependant..but are these issues present because of bad coding/console port etc ??? and if that is the case...whats the chances of a patch coming out to fix this ???

Has anyone out there been able to get this game to run on ultra 2560x1440 60fps+ all the time??
any suggestions on tweaks I can do?..just want constant 55fps + at ultra settings..not really fussed about AA because at this high res i dont really notice too much difference.

Im fairly new to pc gaming after making switch from consoles...so never really had to bother with tweaks, msaa settings ec...so go easy
 
Sabrewulf165 said:
So I borrowed a GTX 560 Ti from a friend to compare to my Radeon 5850 to see if an upgrade would be worth it or not. I'm forced to conclude "no." While the performance of the 560 is betterish overall, it's not significant enough to warrant spending the money.

Granted, it does "feel" better/less buggy, but for some reason I get MASSIVE performance drops in certain dungeon and shop areas... seems to be related to fog effects and/or heat shimmer/multiple light sources. We're talking low 30's fps here, which with vsync enabled is HORRIBLY laggy. I don't experience this with the 5850, performance stays in the 45-50 fps range in the same areas with the same settings. Problem disappears when using the "High" preset, but I haven't bothered figuring out exactly which setting is causing the 560 to choke up (I normally play on Ultra, 4x/16x, FXAA, object detail fade enabled, 1920x1080)

Anyone else experience this?
Click to expand...

On my system, I am running 1920x1080 with settings on Ultra except for shadows, which I have set on high. At these settings, I've seen my GPU usage pump into the 90%+ range but my frames stick around 50-60 fps. I haven't seen too much dip in the city, and haven't seen any of the lag you're talking about. My vram usage seems to hover around 750-800 mb, which makes me nervous because I have a feeling that may have an impact on running texture packs later. This is all with 8xaa, 16xaf, and fxaa enabled.

Right now if I'm just playing the game and not specifically looking for imperfections, it's one of the best games I've ever played. What bugs me more than any visual imperfection in the textures is that my screen keeps telling me to press the wrong buttons. The construction set can't come soon enough.
 
I've played it on my 580 @ 1920x1200 and on my 6870 in my AMD rig @ 1920x1200.

The 6870 does fine as long as I run 4xAA|16xAF. I tap the ultra setting then reduce AA to 4x. I do have tweaks active in my .ini that improve IQ.

The 580 can run whatever level of AA I wish with things like transparency AA as well.

I flippin' love this game.
 
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