The miracle of the potato PC

[Deleted60576446User]

I'm not new to Nexus, only to Nexus forums, but I decided to post something here because I want. Since 2015 I've been playing Skyrim on my potato laptop, and when I tell you the specs, if you know anything about hardware, you will get impressed by the fact that Skyrim is even playable. Skyrim used to be unplayable and ugly, but after so many days of learning about my own Laptop's hardware and INI tweaking, Skyrim was finally good enough... in a small window, but good anyway. I can run Skyrim at the resolution 800x450 and high textures, which makes it run slow at some places, so I play with medium textures, and the rest is pretty well balanced for my Laptop. Now here are the specs:

 

-Intel HD Graphics (Yep...)

-2GB of RAM (1,89 usable)

-Intel Celeron 1.58 (2 CPU's)

 

That's how terrible my Laptop is, but it runs Skyrim at 30FPS mostly with many graphical features disabled with mods (fog, smoke, shadows, small details), but the most impressive thing about the terrible Intel HD Graphics, is that despite the fact that it can't handle a better resolution, it DOES have enough memory to handle 1K textures for most of the things, and believe it or not, it handles 2K textures for weapons and armor whithout ANY performance loss at all! (I spent hours on benchmarking) That's all true, so don't underestimate Intel HD Graphics too much, because it actually handles 2K textures for some things!

The thing that kills my Laptop is the CPU, and if you know about CPU's you know that s*** wasn't supposed to handle Skyrim, but with tweaks and mods it does quite a good job at maintaining Skyrim running at a stable framerate. The frames drop constantly to render the world as I run though Skyrim but it's just for a brief moment.

Even with all of that, Skyrim is not ugly in my Laptop, so if your Laptop or PC is worse or equal to mine, and you are having performance issues, as long as you forget about resolution you can talk to me, and I will gladly share my knowlege with you.

If you know some good mods that won't affect the performance, I would very much like to know, since I'm about to start a new game and I want Skyrim to offer me an experience a bit different from the last one. I have already tested Frankly HD Imperial armor retextures, which is 2K (It's gorgeous!), and my Intel HD Graphics didn't blow up during the civil war, the impact on performance was very subtle if any (Probably thanks to Skyrim Optimization Project).

If you want to know which mods I use on this not-that-bad Laptop, I'll tell ya, you might want to know that they don't affect performance, so it's more knowledge to your brain.

[Kaiouti]

I was surprised when MGSV A Phantom Pain worked on my laptop! It's about 4-6 years old, AsusPro I believe, forgot the specs. I doubt it works now though(smoke damage possibly).

 

when you say mods to lower the blow to performance, I'm picturing Runescape First Person Dual Wield. ha ha