Will it run?

[Zakaroo]

I suspect that it will start, but I don't think it's going to be playeable... unless you are happy with 800 x 600 resolution and all the lowest settings? Even then there's not guarantee.

 

I don't mind running it at absolute lowest settings - I ran Oblivion like that before upgrading. Even New Vegas I tend to run at 640x480 with absolute lowest settings except for draw distances to reduce lag in V.A.T.S.

 

I dare say you could run it in 256MB of VRAM, the problem is it will keep having to go the hard drive or system memory for textures, as a result you'll find it keeps freezing or slowing down. I wouldn't spend any money on that Laptop, you'll just be wasting it.

 

Is there any reason you can't buy a desktop rather than a new laptop? You'll get a lot more for your money.

 

I tend to move around a fair bit, and it's no guarantee that I'll be able to get to the computer any given day. With the laptop, as long as I've got one plug-in spot available I can run most games, or the older ones if I don't have that plug. The main draw is portability - and I've still been able to run most games at relatively high speeds.

 

According to what I can find, the ATI Radeon HD 3200 chip uses Shared Memory. So it will eat some of your RAM when displaying resource heavy games and such, if you have enough ram you can run it, but it will probably not look pretty.

 

I don't mind if it doesn't look pretty - and I've got 4gb of RAM, so I should have some to spare for the Radeon chip. Thanks for the advice!

[Zachcuden]

It might run at the lowest or pretty low settings with console command "tlb" on. It won't look so great but it'll most likely do okay fps wise assuming the game even supports that low of video ram

[MurrayBfromCanada]

...Can this run Skyrim, or should I cancel my pre-order? Considering I got Oblivion to run on an ATI Radeon 9550 with a single-core cpu at 2.66 ghz, with 1 gb of ram, so I'm hopeful.

 

Many posts on this thread are horrifying. Bethsoft sold millions of copies of Skyrim but most of them are still sitting on dealers' shelves. They can't sell them because some people claim the sofware won't run on 90% of the systems in service and few of the potential customers can afford to upgrade because of the recession. Very soon Bethsoft will have to take the software back or give large rebates to the dealers. This will cost them dearly and might have serious consequences for the company.

 

My Xbox died last year and I decided to quit with that Money Pit and purchased a small baby gaming laptop from Best Buy. I still had a gift card from there with enough left on it to purchase Skyrim but bought something else. VIRTUALLY ALL online sources indicated the software would not run on the measily HD 6320 video chip that is in my laptop.

 

Today I watched a video on Youtube of Skyrim running fine at 1280x720 resolution on an Asus 1215b with HD 6320 video processor! Maybe the video was fake but I expect that it was not because virtually all online sources are discussing Skyrim at vertical resolutions of 1080p and up. Almost nobody is talking about the playability of Skyrim at 1280x720 or 1024x576 resolutions which should be possible with most existing graphics cards.

 

The common theme online seems to be that no matter how good your existing equipment is you need to buy all new stuff to run Skyrim. Unless, of course, you happen to own an NVidia Tesla terraflop machine which is absolutely guaranteed to run Skyrim at 1000 fps with 1000 Megapixel resolution. They are nice machies but if you can get by with 24 fps and a less than 1 Megapixel display then you probably don't need a Tesla or any other new hardware for that matter.

[xaliqen]

...Can this run Skyrim, or should I cancel my pre-order? Considering I got Oblivion to run on an ATI Radeon 9550 with a single-core cpu at 2.66 ghz, with 1 gb of ram, so I'm hopeful.

 

Many posts on this thread are horrifying. Bethsoft sold millions of copies of Skyrim but most of them are still sitting on dealers' shelves. They can't sell them because some people claim the sofware won't run on 90% of the systems in service and few of the potential customers can afford to upgrade because of the recession. Very soon Bethsoft will have to take the software back or give large rebates to the dealers. This will cost them dearly and might have serious consequences for the company.

 

My Xbox died last year and I decided to quit with that Money Pit and purchased a small baby gaming laptop from Best Buy. I still had a gift card from there with enough left on it to purchase Skyrim but bought something else. VIRTUALLY ALL online sources indicated the software would not run on the measily HD 6320 video chip that is in my laptop.

 

Today I watched a video on Youtube of Skyrim running fine at 1280x720 resolution on an Asus 1215b with HD 6320 video processor! Maybe the video was fake but I expect that it was not because virtually all online sources are discussing Skyrim at vertical resolutions of 1080p and up. Almost nobody is talking about the playability of Skyrim at 1280x720 or 1024x576 resolutions which should be possible with most existing graphics cards.

 

The common theme online seems to be that no matter how good your existing equipment is you need to buy all new stuff to run Skyrim. Unless, of course, you happen to own an NVidia Tesla terraflop machine which is absolutely guaranteed to run Skyrim at 1000 fps with 1000 Megapixel resolution. They are nice machies but if you can get by with 24 fps and a less than 1 Megapixel display then you probably don't need a Tesla or any other new hardware for that matter.

 

If you looked at when the thread started, it was a few weeks before the game came out. It turns out, the minimum requirements to run the game are lower than many of us expected. By modern standards, Skyrim is not a very demanding game when it comes to hardware.

 

If you have older hardware, the advice on a new game should always be to wait and see how demanding it is in its requirements before buying it. Games that shouldn't be very demanding are sometimes poorly optimized, and games that are pushing the boundaries of current technology are sometimes optimized extremely well. It doesn't cost anything to play it safe, and this is what I'd advise for any new game.

 

Now that Skyrim's out and we can all assess that it's not much more demanding than Fallout 3, it's safe to say that almost everyone should be able to play it (aside from those running Intel graphics chips and/or extremely old hardware).

 

As a side note, an ATI HD 3200 (mentioned in the first post) is very different from an ATI HD 6320M (which you mentioned). PassMark benchmark for the 6320M gets a healthy mid-range score of 239, but the 3200 gets a decidedly lower-end score of 106. If a laptop using the 6320M can play the game well at 1280x720, it doesn't really tell us much about whether a laptop with an HD 3200 can run it.

[MurrayBfromCanada]

Now that Skyrim's out and we can all assess that it's not much more demanding than Fallout 3, it's safe to say that almost everyone should be able to play it (aside from those running Intel graphics chips and/or extremely old hardware).

What horrified me was advice that their hardware was not sufficient to run Skyrim thus killing the sale of the product. A better answer would have been to wait and see what mods come out that might reduce system reqiurements. This could still allow enjoyment of the product when the hardware is less than the official minimum. That video of Syrim running okay on an AMD E-450 / Radeon HD 6320 was not the stock software installation. That user had downloaded some mods that reduced resource requirements so that the program ran well enough on that laptop to be enjoyable. In my case 1280X720 might not even be necessary because for about 800 hours I enjoyed ESIII and ESIV on a SDTV. [it is strange but Grakendo Udico in Passwall seemed better looking at 640x480 than at higher resolutions.]