The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Performance & IQ Preview @ [H]

Playing on an AMD 6950 2GB - maxed settings on my 24" screen (reduced to 4AA) . Plays fine....
I don't know what the complaints are based on but I'm not feeling it.
As for the game...WOW!!
Awesome!
 
adrift02 said:
There were two spots I used for testing, the cart ride into town in the beginning, and the second keep you can run into after the dragon attacks (with the big chandelier H used to show shadows). The jittery effect during the cart ride was if I watched the scenery it would go from smooth to frame-skipping. In the small room I would try and walk back and forward to see if the same jittery frame skip happened. I didn't test panning the camera around because I've found that can be a different issue altogether (BF3 is a great example).

As for the disabling v-sync I just used iPresentInterval=0. Yes, tearing was horrible. After some tweaking, the game seems mostly smooth with v-sync again (I'm still trying to figure out what did it). Panning around is still a bit jerky, yet it's very playable (nothing like it was originally). What I think might have helped was forcing Flip Queue Size to 1, but I'm not sure it that was the entire fix or other ini settings I changed (still testing).

One thing I want to mention about the 59-60 FPS thing, that's something that is somewhat normal. I've had problems in games (usually with a bad driver or driver profile installed) where I was getting stutters/jerkyness with the 59-60 thing. But even when I fixed the problem and everything was smooth (again ended up being a driver issue) the 59-60 FPS thing was still there, just less of it. In this case, I'm pretty sure the problem is the driver. But, I've been able to mitigate it somewhat with whatever tweaks I did.

EDIT: And I Tested the lightsource jitter, it's present in my game even with the rest of the v-sync jitter pretty much cleaned up (I use a controller which rules out the mouse). You know what's interesting though? I've seen that happen in other titles (COD4, Serious Sam), and again, I think it's driver related.
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I used to see this in Oblivion back with my 6600GT (with select Nvidia Drivers). From what little digging I've done, Bethesda's engine is somewhat susceptible to this.

I'm now seeing it on my HD6950.

The short answer is that it's small fluxuations in frametimes, where over the course of the second (and 30-60 frames that are displayed during that time), the average framerate is high, but the time it takes to produce/display each frame is inconsistent and not smooth. So any movement appears to happen at uneven rates, aka "jittery".

This can sometimes be called "microstutter" and is often exprienced in multi-gpu setups.

Tech report put out an article on it, and they did some testing/metrics with BF3 in a new article examining such things.

I did some testing myself, using fraps to output frametimes, then dumping that into excel to format the data, and you can see frequent small, and intermittent large variations in the frametimes, which leads to jitter and "hitching". It's worth checking out.

Hopefully a driver update can take care of this, but I am not too optimistic. Bethesda's engine seems to have some latency issues (where identical frames with the same workload take longer to render, due to issues in the engine) that seem to be compounded by ATI's driver implementation (which is why it isn't so bad on nvidia). There apparently have been previous mods ("hacks") to Oblivion and Fallout to try and combat some of this.

It really comes down to the fact that the style of play for this game (big scenes with slow steady movement in straight lines) leads to making anything like this really stand out. It's in BF3 too but I personally don't really notice it as it's a very hectic/frantic action packed game.
 
I'v been playing straight since release and didn't even realize Nvidia stepped up so quick.


When I get home from work I'll install the new Nvidia drivers and see how those + all these tweak and config changes enhance/improve gameplay experience......we'll see if the 560TI x2 can stretch instead of 1 starring at the other.


The game itself is amazing(VERY IMMERSIVE) and am enjoying the new UI even tho it is console inspired, it is efficient and effective.

....btw that ambient occlusion tidbit will be interesting
 
Yup3d said:
There is a bunch of tweaks available for the PC
INI Tweaks - Enhanced Visuals
http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1256942-ini-tweaks-enhanced-visuals/


But the mayor MAYOR let down for me is that the game menus are all f*cked up at surround/eyefinity resolutions

The game is unplayable at 5760X1200 or any res for 3 screens. The menus are not displayed correctly, the font size or the HUD scales with the res, so it goes off screen

We will have to wait for a patch or a community mod more like it to make it work for 3ple screen gamers.

LAME. but is becoming a common factor that the HUD is always f*ck on most of the games on eyefinity and surround.

Same shit with BF3 and so on...
Click to expand...

NO one gives a shit about triple screens. This is exactly why the majority of us dont run them. Its experimental at best. I like the IDEA of triple screens, but until its considered a stock feature, you are gonna get shitty support.
 
got the game sitting on chair in other room in new unopened box with guide ;)

playing through oblivion now (owned for years but never finished), then will play this after. I didnt expect the graphics to be state of the art as remember this is a console port.

I hope the contrls are easy to convert to gamepad, I was umming and ahhing whether to buy pc or console version but went with pc after I seen the effect of mods and pc had on oblivion, but the downside was the configuring of the gamepad was quite a lot of work.
 
DASHlT said:
It's not just Kyle who talks about ATI having bad driver support.

Tomshardware.com, Guru3d.com, Anandtech.com all mention the issue.

It goes back to Deus ex, Rage, Bf3, Skyrim.....These are all big game releases....Nvidia has drivers out the day or the day before the game release. Ati is usually 1-2 weeks after the game release.

Well I am sorry. I beat rage by the time ATI had proper working drivers, and with Deus ex I was 3/4 of the way done when the driver came out.

I wont go into waiting over 1 week for a stable bf3 driver to work for me...

This is all from experience....and I have to agree with Kyle...he ain't lieing. He is telling how it really is.
Click to expand...

Well I did some playing on rage and deus ex and both performed well on rage I was amazed coz I used older drivers 11.6 orso and I had very few/no issues (texture popping wasn't that bad).

Btw I wouldn't say that Kyle was lying I just have a different experience and different setup then him.

Just thought you guys are [H] might want to give those drivers a shot. http://forum.notebookreview.com/alie...a-drivers.html
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nice find :)
 
Tim James said:
Well, what is it? I don't have any problems with BF3, but maybe I didn't notice them.

Please keep me informed.

Yes I've seen the same kind of feel in other games. The framerate says 60 but it feels like it's half that. It worries me that it won't be fixed.
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BF3:
It's supposedly a mouse related issue that DICE knows about and is patching. Panning with v-sync introduces minor stutter. I've been able to mitigate it by tweaking the game, but yea, it's still an issue.

My Skyrim Tweaks:
I've tried messing with every setting and so far the only thing that helps is forcing Flip Queue Size to 1 with Radeon Pro. The stutter is still there (around light sources for example), but it's much less jarring, makes the game playable until they fix this. My last resort is rolling back to other drivers but I doubt it will help.

Outstanding Issue:
Yea, I doubt it's even on their radar. My guess is it's some combination of things rather than AMD outright (as not everybody has the same problems). But, as someone who has the stutter happening, it sure makes me miss the 560ti I upgraded from.
 
adrift02 said:
BF3:
My Skyrim Tweaks:
I've tried messing with every setting and so far the only thing that helps is forcing Flip Queue Size to 1 with Radeon Pro. The stutter is still there (around light sources for example), but it's much less jarring, makes the game playable until they fix this. My last resort is rolling back to other drivers but I doubt it will help.

Outstanding Issue:
Yea, I doubt it's even on their radar. My guess is it's some combination of things rather than AMD outright (as not everybody has the same problems). But, as someone who has the stutter happening, it sure makes me miss the 560ti I upgraded from.
Click to expand...
I just fixed this using a framerate limiter. I used Dxtory. Click Advanced tab, click the checkbox next to Limit Video FPS (60), and run Skyrim.

Does that work for you? It fixes every spot I used to have jitter -- dungeons, near certain lights, in certain rooms. Nice and smooth to my eyes (I'm normally quite sensitive to it).

What does this mean? Have we confirmed microstutter is gone from the engine? I assume it's still an ATI issue, right?
 
Tim James said:
I just fixed this using a framerate limiter. I used Dxtory. Click Advanced tab, click the checkbox next to Limit Video FPS (60), and run Skyrim.

Does that work for you? It fixes every spot I used to have jitter -- dungeons, near certain lights, in certain rooms. Nice and smooth to my eyes (I'm normally quite sensitive to it).

What does this mean? Have we confirmed microstutter is gone from the engine? I assume it's still an ATI issue, right?
Click to expand...

Thanks, Tim. Since the microstutter wasn't present without v-sync this method works as an alternative (as it's forcing a 60fps cap instead of trying to sync to the monitor). The tearing is pretty annoying though.

What's interesting, is running this cap along with v-sync dramatically improves stuttering as well. It's almost non-existent (better than Flip Queue Size did), though still slightly present.

As for the problem, I think it still goes back to an ATI driver issue. For whatever reason their implementation of v-sync is just plain broken with many configurations/games. Hopefully having it so apparent in Skyrim will highlight the need for a fix though.

Thanks again for the Dxtory workaround.
 
PRIME1 said:
Actually they wrote the code, so yeah that does give them the right to name it and limit it to their hardware. AMD eventually wrote the code for their cards many months later. It's not paid anything, NVIDIA just makes sure their cards work as they should with new games, AMD....not so much.
Click to expand...
Did you read the thread link I posted? AMD did not need to write any code, the game used standard DirectX features. All that was necessary to enable AA was changing the PCI vendor ID to make the Batman game think it was running on an NVidia card.
 
My system runs the game maxed at Ultra Setting 4xAA at 1920x1080.
Also for the first time in a while I just dont know what Kyle is going on about.
The game looks gorgeous. The only reason you would launch an Elder Scrolls game to focus on the graphics is if you hardly played the series at all...
 
adrift02 said:
Thanks, Tim. Since the microstutter wasn't present without v-sync this method works as an alternative (as it's forcing a 60fps cap instead of trying to sync to the monitor). The tearing is pretty annoying though.

What's interesting, is running this cap along with v-sync dramatically improves stuttering as well. It's almost non-existent (better than Flip Queue Size did), though still slightly present.

As for the problem, I think it still goes back to an ATI driver issue. For whatever reason their implementation of v-sync is just plain broken with many configurations/games. Hopefully having it so apparent in Skyrim will highlight the need for a fix though.

Thanks again for the Dxtory workaround.
Click to expand...
Glad it worked. Thanks for the confirmation. And yeah, I'm running with vsync.

Now that shadows and jitter are fixed, it's time to play!!
 
chithanh said:
Did you read the thread link I posted? AMD did not need to write any code, the game used standard DirectX features. All that was necessary to enable AA was changing the PCI vendor ID to make the Batman game think it was running on an NVidia card.
Click to expand...

I know it's pretty bad that AMD could not even implement a standard DirectX feature like AA. Similar to what happened with StarCraft II. That's kind of what people are complaining about.
 
Remember Dragon Age 2 and NV were caught with their pants down for a month until driver fixed so many bugs and performance?

Shit happens.
 
adrift02 said:
What's interesting, is running this cap along with v-sync dramatically improves stuttering as well. It's almost non-existent (better than Flip Queue Size did), though still slightly present.
Click to expand...
After playing a few more hours, I agree it's not completely gone. I still get jerky framerates in certain dungeons with lots of lighting. Sometimes the framerate is below 60 but it still feels like it's much lower than that. Anyway, it's 95% playable.
 
Oblivion was life-changing (played it 1,000 hours at least with mods). I literally laughed out loud when I stepped out of the sewers and took off running. Fallout 3 was an absolute blast the minute I stepped out of the vault.

I'm still trying to get the feeling of either of those games with Skyrim. Its pretty and all, but its just not quite doing it for me yet. Weird. Been waiting five years and its sort of falling flat at the moment. Maybe it will build with time.
 
Running smooth in Ultra mode in 1920x1080, and 3D Vision.... it's damn stunning in 3D, and everything runs smooth.
 
PRIME1 said:
chithanh said:
Did you read the thread link I posted? AMD did not need to write any code, the game used standard DirectX features. All that was necessary to enable AA was changing the PCI vendor ID to make the Batman game think it was running on an NVidia card.
Click to expand...
I know it's pretty bad that AMD could not even implement a standard DirectX feature like AA. Similar to what happened with StarCraft II. That's kind of what people are complaining about.
Click to expand...
Heh, you almost got me there. :)
Anyway, for some games the ball is in AMD's court, and Skyrim is apparently one of those. StarCraft II maybe too, I did not look at it in detail. But for Batman AA and other games with vendor locks (or quasi-locks like Crysis 2) that was not the case.
 
My experience is stability is good, bugs are kept to a min.


I'v had to exit the game completely to have a scripted event complete propetly, (in game re-load would not work)

I'v also got it to crash a few times with heavy heavy alt tabbing in and out of the game.

But besides that and the UI consolitis, this is the best game ever.
 
Angelz3 said:
Hey guys, is skyrim stable enough that I should buy it and play it?
Click to expand...

I went ahead and grabbed it from Steam, and it seems to work pretty well. I've only played a few hours now, but haven't had any crashes or notable bugs.

From a performance standpoint, I'm using the 11.10 official drivers and no CAP and appear to have at least some X-fire performance (~80% utilization on both GPU's), but it's definitely not working correctly. Even so, the game runs pretty well (50 ~ 70 FPS depending on area) with ultra settings.
 
Hailwood said:
I went ahead and grabbed it from Steam, and it seems to work pretty well. I've only played a few hours now, but haven't had any crashes or notable bugs.

From a performance standpoint, I'm using the 11.10 official drivers and no CAP and appear to have at least some X-fire performance (~80% utilization on both GPU's), but it's definitely not working correctly. Even so, the game runs pretty well (50 ~ 70 FPS depending on area) with ultra settings.
Click to expand...

As pointed out about a page ago, I have confirmed with other posters that the catalyst 11.12 early beta works perfectly with crossfire one a single screen. It may even work for eyefinity but noone else has eyefinity and I don't have the game yet. I give credit to DASHIT for point it out to me. You want to use 11.12 eb with 11.9 cap 4. You can download and install 11.12eb right here

Keep in mind these are early beta drivers and you use them at your own risk. Although several people I know have used them safely, I take no responsibility if this destroys your OS ;)
 
Angelz3 said:
Hey guys, is skyrim stable enough that I should buy it and play it?
Click to expand...

Plenty stable and certainly fun. The issues discussed here don't really effect gameplay, just Crossfire utilization. Even with one card it still runs and looks fine, you just can't crank all of the settings into the 'Ultra' zone.

The only bug I've seen so far (granted I've only played an hour a day) was getting my character stuck among some rocks in a tunnel. I couldn't move and had to re-load at the last save.

Great game, worth the investment. Would buy again AAA+++
 
I have it running well on 2x5870 now, ok, only runs well on one 5870 for now. Disable Xfire, disable mouse smoothing, disable vsync, set fov = 100, tweaked shadows, and add the below lines as instructed . Have had a few CTDs but nothing too annoying.

Fixing vertical mouse movement and horizontal mouse movement (thz to KleyMEN)
Quote:
Originally Posted by KleyMEN View Post

Go to the directory where your Skyrim.ini is in(which is usually Documents>My Games>Skyrim)
Open the .ini file and check for [Controls] section. If it's not present, just create one at the end of the file.
Add fMouseHeadingYScale=0.0200 and fMouseHeadingXScale=0.0200
Note: You may have to tweak the numbers until you discover what works for you.
 
Lord_Exodia said:
As pointed out about a page ago, I have confirmed with other posters that the catalyst 11.12 early beta works perfectly with crossfire one a single screen. It may even work for eyefinity but noone else has eyefinity and I don't have the game yet. I give credit to DASHIT for point it out to me. You want to use 11.12 eb with 11.9 cap 4. You can download and install 11.12eb right here

Keep in mind these are early beta drivers and you use them at your own risk. Although several people I know have used them safely, I take no responsibility if this destroys your OS ;)
Click to expand...

Thanks. I had seen your post about the 11.12 drivers, but decided to wait until some 'official' download is available on ATI/AMD's site. Call me overly cautious, but the game runs well enough for me to wait.
 
Tim James said:
After playing a few more hours, I agree it's not completely gone. I still get jerky framerates in certain dungeons with lots of lighting. Sometimes the framerate is below 60 but it still feels like it's much lower than that. Anyway, it's 95% playable.
Click to expand...

Yea, much better though. Dd you have issues with shadows and fix it? I'm still getting flickering outside (far off mountain, mid-range rocks, like around white helm). Can't seem to fix it except for the mountain flicker which I can remove by dropping my far off detail to medium.
 
subyman said:
Guess I will be putting my GTX470 back in to play this one.
Click to expand...

Without knowing what you are currently using this comment makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.


Angelz3 said:
Hey guys, is skyrim stable enough that I should buy it and play it?
Click to expand...

If you like TES games, then YES! So far it's better than Oblivion.


Gnasher said:
I have it running well on 2x5870 now, ok, only runs well on one 5870 for now. Disable Xfire, disable mouse smoothing, disable vsync, set fov = 100
Click to expand...

I can see noticeable fisheye at fov=90 on a 1920x1080 monitor in both the vertical and horizontal directions. I've settled on 85 or so. See here for the CF fix:

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1651227

You can either use the 11.12EB drivers or the dll fix. I've been using the dll fix (drop it in your Skyrim directory) and am getting amazing performance.

Edit: I get much better performance with crossfire/eyefinity when using the DLL fix rather than just the 11.12EB driver.
 
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DASHlT said:
http://donotargue.com/cfg-makers/skyrim/

This link makes an INI file to the settings you want. it adds ULTRA EXTRA settings as well....jaw dropping-

I maxed mine out for the 6990. It fixes so many fucking things, and the game looks BADASS NOW.

Give it a shot!
Click to expand...

Would like to add after 2 hours of testing the specially created ini. I was able to max out both gpu's at 100%, and also use all 4 thread of my I7.

You can also set eyefinity resolutions with this INI, and refresh rate (30,60, 120).

The graphics update was so amazing, it looks so much better i was shocked, Only issue I has really was some slow loading times (from the amount of textures i assume), and a very laggy mouse when in the skills menu.

Do give this a shot, and make sure not to set anything wrong (gamma etc)
 
Great game. Tho getting alot of bugs , crashes and a few lock ups... Fast travel ,game saves,at same time,, locksup... Get some lag when it loads areas guess i need a faster hdd or a sdd. Its tolerable and doesn t happen in dungeons. Talk to someone and an npc is waiting behind, get out of the conversation and that npc warps away. Ride with a horse thats not mine, get off of it on a bridge. Clips through bridge and gets swept away by water :D .... oh yeah i forgot bethesda keeps the bugs in cause they re part of the game... any news on when amd drivers will address ati issues ?
 
So far I've not had any of the problems with audio that others have. I tried using onboard audio first, then switched to my Asus Essence GTX set at 192KHz.

The annoying part is that as of today, I can't alt-tab or meta-tab anymore. Can anyone tell me how to fix this? It worked fine from midnight on the 11th when Steam decrypted it until early in the morning today. I launched it this afternoon and now I can't switch to the desktop via any means.
 
Game runs fine for me. No crashes yet. 480gtx and 2500K at stock atm.

OC seems to cause issues with BF3 so no oc atm for me.
 
valve1138 said:
I wonder if I should pick up a 560 or something to replace my 5870 in my i5 rig.
Click to expand...

What kind of performance are you getting? I would imagine a 5870 would be able to play on Ultra settings with MSAA disabled and FXAA enabled at 1920x1080. A 560 is a downgrade from a 5870.
 
I've been using a GTX460 and a 2500k, but I'm thinking about picking up another 460 to SLI. I'm thinking that the 1GB vram might be a limitation though, and I might not be happy with the results. I'd hate buying a higher end card when new stuff should be launching in late December or January.

Right now at 1920x1200 it doesn't run as smoothly as I'd like even at high settings and FXAA. Anyone using SLI 460s?
 
It's unfortunate that SLI scaling is so bad for this game right now. Really shouldn't be getting slowdown on my rig at 1920x1080.
 
Yeah, i feel bad for the people with multi GPU configurations, there's really no excuse for this shit.

I think that Bethesda didn't even test their shit at all, they should have made sure the game worked with the latest drivers that are available before shipping.
 
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