OK I am a little ticked off now

[Halororor]

I don't think it's an issue with Crossfire, I think it's an issue with certain AMD cards in general. I'm running a Sapphire HD 6870 and using patch 1, could run the game just slightly below Ultra and only had to turn off grass. When patch 1.3 came out, my performance halved and I am now forced to play the game on a mixture of medium and high to just get it to run properly, and I still experience the occasional stuttering in busy areas.

 

Also running the 12.1 AMD drivers.

[Iv000]

Strange, I'm using a Sapphire 6870 with the latest patch and 12.1 drivers. All settings on ultra, except shadows which are on high.

2K HD textures, weapon, armor, clothing and misc textures. Also Xenius's character enhancement and hair textures.

Running with TESV-AL and in windowed mode with SBW, I'm always on 60FPS except cities and other busy areas, and there's a bit of stuttering but that's because of the 2K texture pack.

I'm going to try Sky Boost to see if it improves the city areas.

 

I can't complain, it's running almost flawless.

Edited January 14, 2012 by Iv000

[dazzerfong]

OK, I'll be as frank as I can, so as not to tick anyone off with their high-end systems. I am running an old nVidia 9800 GTX+. with an Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 @ 3.16 gHz, and 4 GB DDR2 800 mHz RAM. Resolution's at 1680 x 1050, 4xAA, 16xAF, fade and LOD all High, shadow maps at 1024, water settings all high. I next to never drop below 30 fps, even when Firefox is running in the background. I only use the performance .dll mod, which didn't change the FPS much but caused less temporary freezes with the game, as well as improved textures for water, ground, environment, etc.

 

Now, the good news for nVidia users: there's a new beta driver which (they claim) improves performance in Skyrim by up to 25%. For me, it's closer to 15%, but come on!

 

Oh, and several things I have observed (might be wrong):

 

Older cards seem to be running Skyrim better (or it's just that those with high-end computers just push the game to its limits).

Anisotropic filtering barely affects the performance (3-5 FPS for me).

Since I am using a Core 2 Duo, patch 1.3 made everything a lot better for me.

Edited January 14, 2012 by dazzerfong

[Dan3345]

Vagrant I see what you are saying now. I have tried this in the past. It always turns out to be two things. AA, and shadows. Turn both off (or shadows down in this case) and the game does run much better. But the graphical glitches remain. Perhaps I just have to wait for a driver patch for that. Still I do wish I could get better performance out of skyrim.