The LOD and draw distance settings appear pretty borked tbh - some things render very well at distance (streams are especially noticeable) while their surroundings are as low detail as can be. I'm using the ini tweaks suggested all over the internet and they probably have made some impact, but not noticeable. As we have pretty much the same setup I'll go ahead and say you'll be fine
The olny .ini tweak to be wary of is the ugridstoload increasing this by odd numbers i.e. 7 to 9,11,13 etc.. may increase distance detail at possible expense of stability and fps but beware any game saved at one setting will crash if loaded at a lower one so make sure to test it thoroughly before committing your save game to that setting.
9 is the sweet spot for me - although it would be best to apply the Large Addressability patch as well - you are bringing in a lot more stuff and can quickly hit the limit otherwise.
Showerhead I've got ugridstoload=9 and I haven't had any stability problems, just one crash in the last couple of days. Making the skyrim executable large address aware seems to sort out a lot of the stability issues. Some screenies from a nice wander in the west: Something I noticed playing this evening was the way the lighting changes so dramatically from one area to the next - it's a smooth transition, but it gets much more desaturated as you head up into the mountains (or down to the sea). Edit: hmm, photobucket has shrunk them. Meh, fix some other time
Quick question for you lot: is there something wrong with my equipment, or am I just expecting too much from this game/my hardware? I bought this game earlier on in the week and loved it, running it straight out of the box on near max settings (all draw distance sliders set to max, everything else on ultra/max, but AA set to 2x) and was getting smooth gameplay without too much fuss (40-60fps). However, in deciding that this just wouldn't do I went out and grabbed a second video card and another couple sticks of RAM, but found that it made for next to no difference in the game - if anything performance was worse. A quick bit of searching showed me a few tweaks (raising the amount of RAM the exe was able to use, RadeonPro tweaks, driver tweaks) but yet when raising AA above what I was able to do with a single card, I get a slideshow - unless I alt+tab in and out again. But even then, 34fps seems about all I can hope for outside, and 45-60fps seems the norm indoors. Is this really what my system is capable of, even with the buggy CFX in this game? And before you ask, I did the GPU-Z check, and both cards are being used at 80-90% consistently in the game. I'm also thinking that maybe the next CAP/update will help things, but I've seen others with similar systems getting well better results. Phenom II X4 970 @3.6 HIS IceQ 6870 1gig Xfire (two cards) with latest driver and CAP 16gig RAM Thoughts?
I have the sound issues where I need to go into control panel and change the audio down to 24 bit 41k, which is annoying but I can deal with that. Besides that, I've had no trouble with the game. How do you check your time played?
X:\X\Steam\userdata\xxxxxxxxx\760\remote\72850\screenshots Easiet way is just to load up steam, go into skyrim then at the bottom of the screen that says play at the top, it says view screen shot library, then view on disk
Thanks, That folder contains my Dragon Age screenshots, so I'll have a trawl through this folder and see if I can find anything. *edit* Hmm, odd, no Skyrim screenshots in that folder at all. And none listed in steam either. Obviously hasn't saved them properly. Damn. *edit 2* Found out why, I've got my screenshot button set to F12, so even though I was pressing print screen, and it came up with a message about screenshot saved in skyrim, it wasn't actually doing it. Either that or they've been saved somewhere else.
when I use print screen in game it just puts my screens in the actual skyrim steam folder you know steam/steamapps/common/skyrim
aha, got them, Think I'd missed them before, as they're a .bmp file and the icon doesn't look like all the other image format icons, Thanks So here's one of mine from a night sky
Mmm. I would guess that your CPU isn't the problem either. Tbh I've noticed the frame rate dropping in very misty areas, it can be a bit of a system killer in some places. Maybe just rubbish Xfire drivers?
Yeah it's a bit frustrating as after doing yet more tweaks I managed to get it to give me a consistent 100-130fps indoors, and 40fps outside, except for a few very random areas within inhabited sections where it'll drop down into the single digits for a bit, then randomly bounce back to normal. Sometimes I really hate PC gaming, and think I should just go back to consoles...
Im loving the game on the whole but does anyone find its far to easy to kill dragons no matter what difficulty settings are used?
the other day my companion just vanished She isnt dead, as her bed in my house is still owned, so im guessing I have told her to wait somewhere. Skyrim is vast, I have no idea where I left her and its probably in a dungeon somewhere Im not too bothered, I will get another companion, she just had a load of stuff in her bag I quite want. I know she isnt dead, as when she has died in the past I have always reloaded so as to give her a second chance. Dont suppose there is anyway to magic her back to my house? Dare i say it a console command?
From what I've seen in my own game if you leave it a few days they normally return of their own accord.
First CTD yesterday. Could hear my HDD chugging away running up to it, and then boom, all of a sudden, straight back to desktop, no error message or anything. Weirdly, Google Earth seemed to have either installed or updated itself, which is what the HDD noise was from, and I'm thinking possibly what caused the CTD. No idea why the hell it installed itself, its showing as a new prog in start menu, so must have installed itself rather than updated.
Got Skyrim this weekend, and I am loving it! Personally I don't even bother with the companions at all. I've always played a stealth sniper type so I end up climb up the other end of a mountain, then sliding down to some obscure ledge and taking out the guards form a distance. If I did use a companion, prob either fall to thier death or fall on top of me and shove me off the ledge sidenote: dead people still sitting in chairs with a arrow sticking out of thier mouth is slightly disturbing... /2cents
