shinigamicarice Posted February 11, 2012 Share Posted February 11, 2012 Hello! I'm sure this has been discussed, but after a great deal of searching online I have gotten conflicting information. So I thought I'd throw this question out to you guys to try and get a clear answer. In November of last year I did a major upgrade to my Gateway 300L (A 2004 model). A new Biostar A880G+ motherboard, a AMD Athlon II X2 250 processor, 1.75 GB memory and a new power supply. I had already upgraded my hard drive to a 300 GB model. The motherboard has an onboard AMD Radeon HD 4250 graphics processor, and it's actually running fairly nicely. A little bit of expected lag with higher graphics settings, but on medium quality it seems to run just fine. Viewing the map lags a bit, which I can deal with. There is some issue with shadow striping and occasionally there is a bit of stipling/striping on other objects. Skyrim Settings: http://i1238.photobucket.com/albums/ff495/CariceLaur/skysett.jpg http://i1238.photobucket.com/albums/ff495/CariceLaur/skysett2.jpg The Radeon Settings: Smoothvsion Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic settings are on Application Settings, Catalyst AI is disabled, Mipmap is on the first Quality Setting (slider is on the 3rd setting to the right), Vertical Refresh is "On, unless application settings say otherwise", Adaptive Anti-Aliasing is on Quality and OpenGL Buffering is off. The driver is updated, and I even rolled it back and reinstalled. Now, the issue I'm having that is the most annoying is that my game is missing one of the best parts of the Skyrim Graphics. There is no fog, no steam, no smoke, no dragon fire and no mist! What a gip! Now, I'm assuming that perhaps this issue is simply a matter of my system not being able to run those graphics at it's current power, and I need an upgrade of memory or even a new graphics card. I'm not in a rush, since I can play the game at decent settings and still enjoy it. But if I can get it to run those additional graphics and not suffer an FPS loss, I would be tickled. So any suggestions? Or should I just be patient until I upgrade again? Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nosisab Posted February 11, 2012 Share Posted February 11, 2012 This guide should help you to get the most of your hardware. It works with ATI cards too. Special attention with shadows, reducing their overall quality may give you a greater performance increase so you might increase a few other things and still get satisfactory playability. It is a long guide but well worth the reading. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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