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

PRIME1 said:
AA did not work with Batman on AMD cards when it was released, same with Starcraft II. That's 2 pretty big developers right there.
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The Batman story has been dissected to great lengths, not sure how you could possibly have missed it.
Batman worked fine with AA on AMD cards when they [post=1037640660]spoofed the PCI vendor ID[/post] of the card. So the drivers and hardware worked on day 1. Just the game had some mechanism which disabled features as soon as it detected a card from the wrong manufacturer. (This was later removed.)
 
the controls do have more of a console feel to it, at least that's what I've heard, still it is a great game despite it's quirks. I'll be getting it, but I can wait for a sale. I'm slightly disappointed on how the graphics don't look that vastly improved over Oblivion with graphic mods. Anyway I'm sure some gamer locked in their basement playing Skyrim for hours is going to make some graphical improvements to it later.
 
Games like Skyrim give me more incentive not to upgrade my rig. I actually hope that the PC game Dev's keep up this trend because I'd rather have games with amazing gameplay than games with subpar gameplay but amazing graphics.
 
My 6970 is getting the jittery effect. Even at medium settings sold 60fps, the scenery would go from smooth to really jerky (the cart scene in the beginning is a good example). Going to remove v-sync and see if it helps.

EDIT: Yep, it's a v-sync bug. Doesn't seem to be doing it for me with it off. I've actually experience this on other games before, AMD seems to struggle with implementing it correctly. Meh, don't remember drivers being so bad back when I had my 4850.

EDIT2: K, AA only seems to work when forced.
 
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Does anyone else get a massive performance difference between shadow detail on ultra and high? For me high gives me roughly 2x the fps compared to ultra.

Everything else else maxed, except AA (using FXAA). ini tweaks for improved land and tree shadows, and water effects. 1920x1080. 2500k and GTX 560 ti, 285.79.
 
limitedaccess said:
Does anyone else get a massive performance difference between shadow detail on ultra and high? For me high gives me roughly 2x the fps compared to ultra.

Everything else else maxed, except AA (using FXAA). ini tweaks for improved land and tree shadows, and water effects. 1920x1080. 2500k and GTX 560 ti, 285.79.
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On ultra going from High to Ultra shadows drops me from ~51 to ~45 FPS. No ini tweaks tho
 
chithanh said:
The Batman story has been dissected to great lengths, not sure how you could possibly have missed it.
Batman worked fine with AA on AMD cards when they [post=1037640660]spoofed the PCI vendor ID[/post] of the card. So the drivers and hardware worked on day 1. Just the game had some mechanism which disabled features as soon as it detected a card from the wrong manufacturer. (This was later removed.)
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Ugh, that one!

Arkham Asylum looked a lot like a paid crippling (Nvidia even went so far as to have them call it "Nvidia™ Multi Sample Antialiasing" in the options, as if Nvidia invented antialiasing); seemed to work just fine in the GOTY edition, so they made liars out of themselves. That game has Nvidia slapped all over its box, settings, interface, opening videos, advertisements, and hell, even its instruction manual.

On the subject of Skyrim, though, I skipped MSAA altogether. FXAA looks good enough for me and has a minimal performance hit. I love my 120Hz monitor, too. So nice to have a game running so ridiculously smoothly.
 
R-Type said:
I agree with you. I just spent $500 on dual gpu's advertised to provide an excellent gaming experience by AMD, the fact that they then don't live up to it is failure on their part not mine.
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The developer should provide programming that works within boundaries of the environment it is made to run on. Not the other way around.
We're jstu lucky that AMD/NVIDIA will change their parameters to fix game developers mistakes.

That's like buying a program for windows and then the program crashing and you blaming it on microsoft.
 
Nice review. I, too, am disappointed in the SLI performance. Hopefully they will improve it with new drivers/patches.

BF3 should really not run as much faster as it does compared to the engine of this game.
 
fattypants said:
Arkham Asylum looked a lot like a paid crippling (Nvidia even went so far as to have them call it "Nvidia™ Multi Sample Antialiasing" in the options, as if Nvidia invented antialiasing);.
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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.
 
You have to be kidding! Of all games your trying to defend Batman as having no Nvidia influence? Laughable. Seriously laughable.
 
Edit: A more valid title is The Witcher 2 and their official response here with regard to Surround Support and lack thereof of Eyefinity Support due to how they coded the game. Apparantly CD Projekt received assistance from NVidia and not AMD with regard to implementing multi-monitor support.

This is a little disheartening to think that while AMD introduced a lot of us to multi-monitor gaming, NVidia is doing more to help developers with it.
 
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Best looking game since Mirror's Edge.

A-MAZING

ps
plx dont use ingame fxaa for this one. That's not how it's meant to be played
 
jorojr said:
Edit: A more valid title is The Witcher 2 and their official response here with regard to Surround Support and lack thereof of Eyefinity Support due to how they coded the game. Apparantly CD Projekt received assistance from NVidia and not AMD with regard to implementing multi-monitor support.

This is a little disheartening to think that while AMD introduced a lot of us to multi-monitor gaming, NVidia is doing more to help developers with it.
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Sad that AMD is dropping the ball so much.

Witcher 2 worked in eyefinity for me from day 1, but it was forced 16:9, 3240x1920 is almost 16:9 though so it wasn't that big of deal. Skyrim loads for me, but crashes to the desktop constantly. It crashed 7 times in the opening scene. Despite playable framerates of 25+ on ultra and 50+ on high. Works at 1080p though.
 
Hard to tell if this is a review thread or some happy fanboys gloating.
 
HohnyF said:
Best looking game since Mirror's Edge.

A-MAZING

ps
plx dont use ingame fxaa for this one. That's not how it's meant to be played
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WTF are you talking about. This games looks like shit. Have you even played BF3? Best looking game my ass, and it turned out to be a shitty console port. I want my money back! It feels to sluggish and slow. *sigh* I hate having to know what quality is, it ruins all my fun.
 
I definitely was disappointed too with negative Crossfire scaling (running 2 x 5870 @ 2560x1600). One of the major games in 2011 coming out and on the launch day there's not even estimated release time for the Crossfire profile. Will remember this the next time it's time to buy new video card(s).

On the positive side, the game does actually run very well on a single 5870 too. 2560x1600/2xAA/16xAF and slightly turned down Ultra settings keep the game running smooth (50-60 fps), so it's fully playable and enjoyable. :)
 
FireBean said:
WTF are you talking about. This games looks like shit. Have you even played BF3? Best looking game my ass, and it turned out to be a shitty console port. I want my money back! It feels to sluggish and slow. *sigh* I hate having to know what quality is, it ruins all my fun.
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Exactly! Slow clap starting, feel free to join in ;)
 
adrift02 said:
My 6970 is getting the jittery effect. Even at medium settings sold 60fps, the scenery would go from smooth to really jerky (the cart scene in the beginning is a good example). Going to remove v-sync and see if it helps.

EDIT: Yep, it's a v-sync bug. Doesn't seem to be doing it for me with it off. I've actually experience this on other games before, AMD seems to struggle with implementing it correctly. Meh, don't remember drivers being so bad back when I had my 4850.

EDIT2: K, AA only seems to work when forced.
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Could you describe the original problem some more, and also what you did?

The jittery effect is noticeable in dungeon areas with a light source. When I move the mouse in slow circles it's not smooth at all, even at 60 fps. (Fraps usually jitters between 60 and 59 fps when I notice this effect.) Is that what you've seen?

You said you fixed it disabling vsync. I assume that's in CCC and also the iPresentInterval=0 .ini tweak? When I tried that, the places that used to have jitter tended to shift or tear slightly instead. I've seen this in other games with certain settings, where disabling vsync merely changes it to a slightly different problem. Is that what you noticed?
 
robble said:
The developer should provide programming that works within boundaries of the environment it is made to run on. Not the other way around.
We're jstu lucky that AMD/NVIDIA will change their parameters to fix game developers mistakes.

That's like buying a program for windows and then the program crashing and you blaming it on microsoft.
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No, its not. You will note that very seldom does a game not run at all, this is because the GPU makers DO implement full Directx compatability. However, there are assumptions made by individual developers, particularly with regards to timing and interaction of functions that may or may not be valid in the vendors specific driver implementation. This is why they have to tweak the drivers, its simply the nature of the beast. AMD has simply not been upholding their portion of this arrangement.
 
Tim James said:
Could you describe the original problem some more, and also what you did?

The jittery effect is noticeable in dungeon areas with a light source. When I move the mouse in slow circles it's not smooth at all, even at 60 fps. (Fraps usually jitters between 60 and 59 fps when I notice this effect.) Is that what you've seen?

You said you fixed it disabling vsync. I assume that's in CCC and also the iPresentInterval=0 .ini tweak? When I tried that, the places that used to have jitter tended to shift or tear slightly instead. I've seen this in other games with certain settings, where disabling vsync merely changes it to a slightly different problem. Is that what you noticed?
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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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sirmonkey1985 said:
You should go ask to work for them for free then. AMD/ATI doesn't have the man power to release drivers for game developers that don't give them the games with enough leeway to release drivers when the game comes out. Nvidia has a couple hundred people testing and developing their drivers, AMD/ATI doesn't.

Its also game developers responsibility to make sure the companies get the game in time to actually optimize their drivers to work. its quite obvious they only had a couple weeks to work on the driver optimization's for skyrim given the fact that Nvidia wasn't even able to scale SLI correctly in the game. so to put all the blame on AMD is bullcrap. the fact is you can't expect AMD or Nvidia to be miracle workers to make sure a game works correctly on release day, hell game developers can't even be bothered to make sure their games work on release day anymore.
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I understand where your sentiment is coming from but sirmonkey1985 it's time to take a step back and look at the situation at hand. I recently was also defending AMD and their drivers, right after rage and deus ex came out. I even blamed ID and I still do since multicard still isn't working on both nvidia and AMD. However if a guy posting here on our forum in this case bojamijams can get the game and in one day figure out that enabling a crossfire profile in radeon pro using AFR and AFR Friendly Direct 3d Mode can prevent negative scaling in crossfire on the game, this being one of the most highly anticipated game in years for many, then at least one guy from AMD's driver team could at least get their hands on the game 2 days in advance and take an hour to test this out and discover this profile works on the game and whip up a quick cap that their customers can use. Nvidia has a profile for SLi that gives a good 30% improvement using 580 SLi over a single GTX 580. AMD needs to step it up. I always look at the scenario and unless bethesda refused to give amd access to the game at all before hand then I can only blame AMD in this particular situation.

At the end of the day, if a guy on a forum can figure out a fix for your hardware's performance issues in a day, then I would think AMD's driver team should be able to figure it out in time for launch. They are letting us down plain and simple.

Bojamijams said:
i7 2600k @4.6ghz
8gb RAM
2x 6970 @ 900/1400
11.10 drivers with CAP4
2560x1440 Ultra, 4x AA, 16AF

Using RadeonPRO to set AFR and AFR Friendly D3D Mode

Getting 40-70FPS outside, 100FPS+ inside
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Thanks for posting this. How much performance do you get with a single card. I'd like to know what the scaling is like so we can take your single card and compare it to your already posted crossfire results and get a rough idea what % boost your getting from crossfire with some simple math.
 
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FireBean said:
WTF are you talking about. This games looks like shit. Have you even played BF3? Best looking game my ass, and it turned out to be a shitty console port. I want my money back! It feels to sluggish and slow. *sigh* I hate having to know what quality is, it ruins all my fun.
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BF3?
That over-bloomed, color saturated, headache giving, fuzzy looking desert shooter?
I gave that garbage to a neighbour's kid.
Who gave me his MW3, because he heard from the other kids,
that BF3 is the hot shit in town these days.

I LOL-ed hard because I knew poor kid has some crappy gfx from ATI or some other non-major GPU vendor.
 
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.
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Actually they used a standard microsoft code, so they had no right to call it like they owned it.
 
Lord_Exodia said:
Thanks for posting this. How much performance do you get with a single card. I'd like to know what the scaling is like so we can take your single card and compare it to your already posted crossfire results and get a rough idea what % boost your getting from crossfire with some simple math.
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Did a quickie test running down from Jarl's keep in Whiterun and running a pre-defined path around the Wind district. Results in the picture below.
Edit: Still more playable with single card than in Crossfire config.

 
HohnyF said:
BF3?
That over-bloomed, color saturated, headache giving, fuzzy looking desert shooter?
.
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Hilarious. The first time "discrete" bloom has been used in a game. Frostbite 2 renders bloom for areas that makes sense, not just globally and any bright object a la Crysis 2 and all the rest.

Color saturated? You mean it´s not all brown? Are you aware how saturation looks, cause colors in BF3 are nowhere near saturation levels. Check some other titles for reference; Alice in Wonderland, Unreal Tournament series, Trine etc.

Headaches are on you ;)

The lens flares are over the top, if those are what you were thinking about. Just don´t confuse them with glow and saturation. But like any game, disable what you don´t like in the settings or cfg, personally I always turn off motion blur because it´s idiotic for a shooter.
 
I'm running 3 GTX 480's at 7680x1600 on ultra details but no AA. AA crashes my game, both FXAA and regular, and it is not just vram limits as I've seen it happen at 1420mb.

I'm getting surprisingly good FPS. Anywhere from 45 to 85.

Loving my new ZR30W's.
 
I been playing skyrim on my 6970 and details on ultra, FXAA (2048*1152)and it works pretty well never seen mouse jitter beside sometimes at cramped spaces and not always.

I'm wondering why people make this an ATI vs Nvidia problem it is whenever Kyle hints something people go into overdrive 1st few pages are filled with "ati sucks" then next few pages are "im dropping ATI going to NVIDIA" then the last horde appears and blasts ATI without playing the game.

I just hope they fixed the TDR issue :).
 
Pieter3dnow said:
I been playing skyrim on my 6970 and details on ultra, FXAA (2048*1152)and it works pretty well never seen mouse jitter beside sometimes at cramped spaces and not always.

I'm wondering why people make this an ATI vs Nvidia problem it is whenever Kyle hints something people go into overdrive 1st few pages are filled with "ati sucks" then next few pages are "im dropping ATI going to NVIDIA" then the last horde appears and blasts ATI without playing the game.

I just hope they fixed the TDR issue :).
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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.
 
I tried it on my 6870 in my AMD rig with 4xAA|16xAF @1920x1200 using forced Ultra settings. The driver used was 11.10 WHQL with CAP 4 11.9. I had the below tweaks applied to make the game look better.

bTreesReceiveShadows=1
bDrawLandShadows=1

fShadowLODMaxStartFade=5000.0
fSpecularLODMaxStartFade=5000.0
fLightLODMaxStartFade=5000.0

bUseWaterReflectionBlur=1
bReflectExplosions=1
iWaterBlurAmount=4
bAutoWaterSilhouetteReflections=0
bForceHighDetailReflections=1

uExterior Cell buffers were pushed up to 72.

I pushed up mouse sensitivity in the game CP. The pointer was a little slow at times and there wasn't gross lag.

I got driver stopped responding errors with my OC and vsync, when I went default speed and forced off vsync with iPresentInterval=0 that disappeared.

I got occasional hitches and overall it was smooth.

A few caps-

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/263/skyset.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/4/tesv2011111204374497.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/myimages/213/tesv2011111204392011.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/440/tesv2011111204475446.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/836/tesv2011111204491856.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/502/tesv2011111204500934.jpg/
 
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.
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Did AMD have poor support for DXHR? It actually was an AMD sponsored game (versus Nvidia TWIMTBT) and had Eyefinity and AMD HD3D support at launch, but no Surround or 3D vision support until just recently.
 
limitedaccess said:
Did AMD have poor support for DXHR? It actually was an AMD sponsored game (versus Nvidia TWIMTBT) and had Eyefinity and AMD HD3D support at launch, but no Surround or 3D vision support until just recently.
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Yes it did, Bad stuttering and eyeinfinity problems from what I remember.
 
limitedaccess said:
Did AMD have poor support for DXHR? It actually was an AMD sponsored game (versus Nvidia TWIMTBT) and had Eyefinity and AMD HD3D support at launch, but no Surround or 3D vision support until just recently.
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I never had any issues with DXHR... does this problem only reside with a combo of eyfinity and crossfire?
 
adrift02 said:
I didn't test panning the camera around because I've found that can be a different issue altogether (BF3 is a great example).
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Well, what is it? I don't have any problems with BF3, but maybe I didn't notice them.

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).
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Please keep me informed.

I've seen that happen in other titles (COD4, Serious Sam), and again, I think it's driver related.
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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.
 
I would like to comment that I got Skyrim to run silky smooth on my system with crossfire working on my 6990.

If you use the 11.12 Early beta drivers with the cap4, I have crossfire working. At 1080p. I have 99% usage on gpu1 and 30-80% on gpu2.

I am also running everything maxed out with 4xAA and 16xAF with Adaptive Anti-aliasing on. (shadows ultra)

I do not get any more stuttering of quick frame drops when I get near a fire or odd slowdown anymore.

Just thought you guys are [H] might want to give those drivers a shot. http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/618752-catalyst-11-11-11-12-early-beta-drivers.html
 
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