Maxing Havok - Skyrim Spanked!

[defosh369]

I'm also running my games on a 40' FullHD screen (1920x1080 ofc). I jumped from my Crystal Design Samsung 24' and visual change was significant, but it's really a matter of personal preference. I've also did some testing which one is actually better for gaming, as for HDTV, I do like the size of the picture, contrast and colours. As for the minuses, I've been getting screen flickering without enabling smooth FXAA. As for the monitor, I love the epic refresh rate and the crystal clear picture, without any flickering issues, but screen itself is smaller. In comparison, while playing Skyrim on a monitor, I've never had to crank up the AA, picture was so sharp, you can cut yourself while standing too close. While playing on a bigger screen with more contrast, I could see a noticable drop in picture sharpness (a bit "fuzzy"), forcing you to crank up the AA to at least 4 to recieve your sharpness back. But yeah, this small issue didn't bother me so much, so I'm playing on a 40' all the time :D

 

Also, I'd like to cover the uGridsToLoad thing, people are saying that anything above 7 isn't a good idea. Well, IMO, when you set your buffers correctly, and you have at least 4gigs of ram and 1gig of video ram, you wan't have any problems whatsoever. Well, at least not more that you have before forcing Grids to 9. From my playthrough experience, I've benn playing about 40 hours now with Grids set at 9, with no major problem or many CTD, truth is, my game was more likley go to FUBAR status and CTD before adding additional Grids (though, this may becaused by Bethesda actually trying to fix their game).

 

One more thing, since this tread is also about personal tweaking knowledge, I like to add, that many tweaks are telling people to set land shadowing (bDrawLandShadows=1). Well, from my testing, I can tell one thing. If you're using a low bias scale (fShadowBiasScale below 0.1800 or even 0.2000) just dont use it. Setting land shadowing combined with lower bias scale, will most likley give you an effect simmilar to "ground self-shadowing" where shadows are drawn on ground, without any sorce of the shadow, and this just look... odd (you can test it yourself, this is most noticable in early in-game morning in for example, Riverwood).

[benny00000]

Great graphics still cannot fix poor storyline & gameplay. Awesome PC though

[Thor.]

I'm doing a undead benchmark if you want to check it out lol. 60 undead and climbing at 60fps still.:teehee:

 

All i need now is a dance mod and it'll be a party

 

 

Oh and my Phenom 1100T at 3.30ghz is running at a smooth 3875mhz with turbo.

 

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/imageshare/images/211744-1328416088.jpg

Edited February 5, 2012 by Thor.

[MorwynKelm]

Undead benchmark, I suppose that's more effective than my 30,000 cheese wheels....

[thesapien]

Undead benchmark, I suppose that's more effective than my 30,000 cheese wheels....

 

Was that you? Hilarious!

Or did you see the vid and try it too?

[MorwynKelm]

The first to do it? Well I can't take all the credit. Well, maybe I can. :)

 

At first, I was spawning pots, it got painful real fast, they hurt!

[Thor.]

Next a kettle benchmark :thumbsup:

[PopReference]

I just thought I'd add something I found while looking through the Creation kit wiki:

INI files wiki

 

I'm not sure if all of it's all accurate, but one thing that stood out to me was that a copyed/duplicated skyrim.ini renamed "skyrimcustom" will overide the normal .ini. I'll try it later and see if it works, it's under: User Defined.

 

I was wrong and Steam verify does't seem to change the ini file.

Edited February 10, 2012 by PopReference

[MorwynKelm]

@PopReference, that's really quite helpful, thank you. :)

[KuluSky]

The shadow ground flicker you mention is interesting. I noticed this too on my 65" plasma and it was worse in river wood. It looks like the ground shimmers as you move. The only way I've found to correct this is to turn the shadowbiasscale up to at least 0.8. This stops the problem and I haven't noticed any problems using it this high.

I also use 16af, 4x aa, 4x ssaa and fxaa post processor anti aliasing to get rid of texture shimmers when moving in 3D.

 

I'm playing in 3D and have found most of the ideas for graphical improvement actually cause more problems - example turning on tree shadows because it forces you to use shadow draw distance 8000 to avoid pop in. This has a knock on affect of demanding lots of CPU power and reducing quality of shadows.

 

A much better solution is to turn off tree shadowing, set shadow draw distance to 4000 and use fxaa post processor injector. You can then up the quality of the trees using a mod like Vurts flora overhaul. Combined with lush grass, improved flora and landscape retexture mods, you can achieve stunning landscapes. You can also actually tweak your tv or monitor settings to boost darkness and shadowing. For example enabling a gamma setting of 2.6 and a cool colour temperature, gives very realistic graphics without using heavy fxaa settings or using enb mods.

 

 

 

If anybody is interested, I could produce a guide. I do play in 3D but the results transfer pretty well to my normal pc monitor. However my specs are 4.6ghz i7, 480 sli, ssd etc so it would only be for high end users.