Dear Bethesda, This is What is what meant to look like

[shuriken88]

It's actually about 12 square miles, but yeah, still unreasonable. We can blame the consoles for the small towns.

 

Is that the motto or something for PC gamers?

 

"When in doubt, blame the consoles!"

 

Sorry, i just keep seeing all this blame on consoles everywhere. I am both a PC and Console player, but i play Bethesda games on the PC.

 

Im with you on that one man. Thats just how the mentality of SOME hardcore PC gamers (with an axe to grind) is I suppose, and now its become "trendy" to bash consoles. Sometimes it works both ways though, with console gamers hating on PC gamers in all out "system wars". Its all so childish, but sometimes funny to observe, especially on youtube, people get so angry and take it so personal LOL.

 

"Hey, theres something wrong with this game, things dont look like real life! Duhh, its because of those friggin consoles. I hate consoles. Console gamers suck. Lets do terrorist attacks on Sony!"

 

Anyway, jokes aside, why dont people just release games that DIFFER slightly between platforms, instead of making straight up ports. GTA IV, Saints Row 2 etc, they were some of the WORST ports ever to grace the face of PC gaming. If developers sat back and decided to do some extra groundwork rather than just changing a bit of code to facilitate the port, maybe things wouldn't be the way they are. When you think about it logically, theres NO reason the PC version of a game should be constricted by the performance limitations of the current gen of consoles. so I think if ANYBODY, we should be blaming the developers for being lazy and simply rushing things onto the shelves, NOT the systems their games appear on.

 

Personally I dont pick sides, I love console AND PC gaming, neither side is conclusively "better" than the other, and anybody who claims they ARE, is very uneducated.

 

People just need to live and let live!!!

Edited April 28, 2012 by shuriken88

[Rennn]

 

An Xbox has has a tri-core cpu at 3.2Ghz, 512mb of Vram on an old video card equal to about an 8800 in PC terms.

 

Agh! Too much information for my tiny low IQ brain to handle! D:

 

But what you said after that makes sense. I own both a PS3 and a 360 (because of exclusives) so i can see where you are going with this, the consoles don't have much memory or something to be able to run certain games while the PC, it can because the options to customize it are limitless... right?

 

Memory isn't the exact term, but yeah, pretty close. Bethesda obviously knew they had to make the graphics better than in Oblivion or people would be angry about that, but the current hardware in the consoles is the exact same as it was five years ago. As a result, the most appealing option is to make the most stressful parts of the game smaller and take things out.

 

How well the game is programmed has a noticeable effect as well, but the Creation Engine (it's used with Skyrim) is only slightly better than Oblivion's engine, so there wasn't a lot they could do to optimize it either.

 

Right... We'll, of course they had to make the graphics better than oblivion, this isn't 2008.

But some games i know of that have better graphics than skyrim run smooth on the consoles. I guess its different for the elder scrolls and fallout because they are such huge games, correct?

 

Mostly. Skyrim is open world, and the game needs to be able to load any land at any time. As a result, it uses LOD to represent distant terrain, but it's not as efficient as using LOD which is only a static picture or something of that nature. In addition, the NPCs move dynamically through the game world, and the open-ended nature of Skyrim makes it difficult for older processors to run effectively. In Oblivion, for example, enemies would chase you out of caves and all over the countryside. They mostly removed this in Skyrim because more processing power was needed to track other, new things, like dynamic snow and the new shadows. Skyrim, for example, draws dynamic shadows on literally everything in the game (although it doesn't look like it at times because certain light sources don't cast shadows on other things). They needed to do this because Skyrim was too big for Bethesda to make and add shadows for everything. Other games can use more efficient methods, but as an open world game with so much variability, Skyrim is resource-hungry and demands a lot more.

[Zazoomah]

 

Personally I dont pick sides, I love console AND PC gaming, and the fact that consoles have always seemed to have a wider selection of blockbuster games than PC's must say SOMETHING in defense of the console gaming market. Im not trying to offend anyones ideologies, just making an observation and a valid point.

 

People need to stop wasting their time arguing and just play the damn game and have fun!

 

I agree with you with that, I hate this never ending war on "which platform is better". Just about every video i click on youtube theres some playstation or xbox fanboy insulting another console which starts this war.

 

Example that i have seen:

 

"AAAAHHH!!! THE GRAPHICS ARE SOO BAD!!! MY EYES!!! Oh wait, its an xbox game! thats why the graphics are terrible!" - Ps3 gamer, Mirrors edge walkthrough, youtube

Edited April 28, 2012 by Zazoomah

[Zazoomah]

 

An Xbox has has a tri-core cpu at 3.2Ghz, 512mb of Vram on an old video card equal to about an 8800 in PC terms.

 

Agh! Too much information for my tiny low IQ brain to handle! D:

 

But what you said after that makes sense. I own both a PS3 and a 360 (because of exclusives) so i can see where you are going with this, the consoles don't have much memory or something to be able to run certain games while the PC, it can because the options to customize it are limitless... right?

 

Memory isn't the exact term, but yeah, pretty close. Bethesda obviously knew they had to make the graphics better than in Oblivion or people would be angry about that, but the current hardware in the consoles is the exact same as it was five years ago. As a result, the most appealing option is to make the most stressful parts of the game smaller and take things out.

 

How well the game is programmed has a noticeable effect as well, but the Creation Engine (it's used with Skyrim) is only slightly better than Oblivion's engine, so there wasn't a lot they could do to optimize it either.

 

Right... We'll, of course they had to make the graphics better than oblivion, this isn't 2008.

But some games i know of that have better graphics than skyrim run smooth on the consoles. I guess its different for the elder scrolls and fallout because they are such huge games, correct?

 

Mostly. Skyrim is open world, and the game needs to be able to load any land at any time. As a result, it uses LOD to represent distant terrain, but it's not as efficient as using LOD which is only a static picture or something of that nature. In addition, the NPCs move dynamically through the game world, and the open-ended nature of Skyrim makes it difficult for older processors to run effectively. In Oblivion, for example, enemies would chase you out of caves and all over the countryside. They mostly removed this in Skyrim because more processing power was needed to track other, new things, like dynamic snow and the new shadows. Skyrim, for example, draws dynamic shadows on literally everything in the game (although it doesn't look like it at times because certain light sources don't cast shadows on other things). They needed to do this because Skyrim was too big for Bethesda to make and add shadows for everything. Other games can use more efficient methods, but as an open world game with so much variability, Skyrim is resource-hungry and demands a lot more.

 

 

OK, i think i understand that now, thanks for clearing things up. :)

[Rennn]

 

Personally I dont pick sides, I love console AND PC gaming, and the fact that consoles have always seemed to have a wider selection of blockbuster games than PC's must say SOMETHING in defense of the console gaming market. Im not trying to offend anyones ideologies, just making an observation and a valid point.

 

People need to stop wasting their time arguing and just play the damn game and have fun!

 

I agree with you with that, I hate this never ending war on "which platform is better". Just about every video i click on youtube theres some playstation or xbox fanboy insulting another console which starts this war.

 

Example that i have seen:

 

"AAAAHHH!!! THE GRAPHICS ARE SOO BAD!!! MY EYES!!! Oh wait, its an xbox game! thats why the graphics are terrible!" Ps3 gamer

 

360s have more VRAM (double, in fact, though it's not as simple as a direct comparison), while PS3s have many more cpu cores. Generally speaking, CPU heavy games will run better on the PS3 while games with a lot of eyecandy up close will run better on the 360. PCs are generally higher spec, but then there are thousands of people with laptops who need to be able to game as well, so PC games are generally made to run in some capacity on hardware that's 5 years old.

 

As a direct result of these differences, games released on all 3 platforms with different advantages and disadvantages, plus less development time per system, will look and play worse than games made on only a single system, which helps to drive the market for exclusives. If you actually average out the specs of the 360 and PS3, and look at the graphics in exclusives, they're actually very similar in different ways, with the PS3 favoring games with complex AI or particle effects such as Killzone 3, and the 360 favoring games with higher resolution textures like Gears of War.

 

Killzone 3's textures actually were very high resolution as well, and I'm not sure how they managed that. With Blood Magic, probably. :P

Edit: Actually it was probably because the maximum supported resolution in KZ3 was 720p, while in KZ2 it was actually 1080p, and screen resolution has a huge impact on vram useage.

 

Back on topic, Skyrim's engine is presumably unoptimized for a single system, and therefore it's inefficient at times. Brute force can usually offset an innefficient engine though: a 6-core AMD cpu (mine is a quad core though) optimized with multithreading tweaks in the Skyrimprefs.ini and paired with a 6770 seems to be able to power through having twenty guards on-screen at once without noticeable slowdown. If it can do that, similar cpus shouldn't have much trouble running larger towns, regardless of the weaknesses of the engine. A 6770 isn't a very strong card, implying that it's not cpu limited, so I assume that most gamers would benefit from a mod for larger towns.

Edited April 28, 2012 by Rennn

[shuriken88]

LOL about the "people not chasing out of caves and all over the world anymore" because of CPU usage! That was one of the most annoying, but also hilarious things about Oblivion! I remember literally running for like 10 minutes, being chased by some powerful enemy and I didn't have any health potions left. Its like "worlds scariest police chases" of Oblivion, and every time I run past another enemy, he joins in the chase and eventually I've got like 10 enemies chasing me from all over the countryside and I'm like "FFS man, when is this gonna end!?". Eventually I reach a town and try to get the guards involved and it turns into a full scale civil war, and I STILL die.

 

Funny shiz

 

Also dynamic shadows is one of the best new features to hit Skyrim. Dynamic shadows should be in EVERY game IMO, I just love it. I mean, they had it as far back as 2001 with Silent Hill 2, so these days there should be no excuse NOT to have it!

 

What do you think would be the cheapest GFX card that can run Skyrim semi-flawlessly? Same goes for my CPU, I thought 2 3.00GHz cores and a HD4870 would cut it, but DAMN was I wrong!

Edited April 28, 2012 by shuriken88

[worldofscotty]

You can usually play Ultra settings if you turn the shadows down to high

[Karasuman]

 

 

What do you think would be the cheapest GFX card that can run Skyrim semi-flawlessly? Same goes for my CPU, I thought 2 3.00GHz cores and a HD4870 would cut it, but DAMN was I wrong!

 

A GTX460 can be found for $129 on Newegg as well as other sites, and the 460 can run Skyrim perfectly. The 560's are only $20 more.

[Rennn]

My GTX 460 only has 768MB of vram, but other than that it's pretty much the same as any other GTX 460. Mine's slightly factory overclocked, but not enough to make much of a difference. I struggle for vram at times, but 1GB or even 2GB versions are far more common and no more expensive (I wish I'd known that earlier, lol). With the extra vram, a 1GB version should be able to put Skyrim on ultra well enough, as long as you don't play at an extreme resolution or expect to run an ENB mod. I have to settle for almost-ultra at 55 fps (in Whiterun) with shadows on merely high, but everything else on ultra.

 

I turn down my settings a bit since who honestly notices the difference between an actor fade of 14 versus 16? The extra rooom allows me to load up on mods without worrying about slowdown. If you can find a 470 that'd be even better for a little futureproofing, but I'm not sure of the cost on those. A GTX 460 is a solid card. It runs cool, but be aware that it takes 2 six-pin power connectors from your Power Supply Unit.

 

Edit: I should also mention that I despise stutter even more than slowdown. When I say 55 fps, I mean I can cap it at 55 fps with little or no stutter under high stress conditions in Skyrim, and that's with my inferior vram. I've seen people on Youtube run Skyrim and Fraps at the same time without stutter or slowdown on ultra, at 30 fps, on a GTX 460 1GB.

 

Personally, I cap it at 30 fps just so I can download almost any mods with zero stutter, but it's not necessary to cap a GTX 460 that low if you don't want, assuming you have a decent cpu. I even ran ENB for a while, but decided that the hit was too large to bear, so don't plan on that, especially since the 1.5 patch ruined most ENB mods, and ALL of the best looking ones based on 1.02. I bought my GTX 460 at Best Buy for $130, but I overpaid considering that mine isn't a great version. I didn't know much about tech stuff at the time.

 

As for your cpu, a quad core would be best, but a dual core can definitely max Skyrim if it's good. My advice would be to try upgrading the video card first, since Skyrim is still more video card reliant than cpu reliant. Also, the shadows are cpu calculated, so turning only the shadows down will really help a weaker cpu since they're a massive hit. Whether shadows are on medium, high or ultra, they all look good past 2 meters away and they all look pretty bad closer than that, so there's not much reason to turn them to ultra.

Edited April 29, 2012 by Rennn

[shuriken88]

Thanks for the comments and H/W advice. Speaking of stutter, my game sometimes stutters like theres no tomorrow. Im guessing its caused by new "blocks" of landscape being loaded into memory or something, because it happens far less often in towns. In towns I simply lag (sometimes hard), but in the wilderness, things can be very smooth, but interrupted by extreme stutter spasms say every 2-5 minutes. I've been putting up with it though, cos right now I have no choice lol.

 

Im sure my 4870 also takes two 6-pin power connectors, so I SHOULD be okay. One thing that was a bit dodgy about the 4870 though, was how huge the thing is. Its not incredibly wide, but its the longest card I've ever had. Its so long, that its practically TOUCHING the hard-drives in the rack at the front! Because of that, I had to move all the HDD's down by one "shelf", and even then, because of the length of the thing, I had to wire it up in a very tight way! Any bigger and it wouldn't have even fit in my case, which I'm sure is just a standard sized ATX (if thats what their called) towebox, the same as most people.

 

When I bought the 4870 I had to up the power supply too, so I bought a "Fatality Gaming Gear 550W", which wasn't too expensive. Do you think that would be enough to power a GTX 460 or 470?

 

I've been thinking I need to change to an nVidia card anyway, because both the BRAND NEW ATI cards I've bought have had something wrong with them. My old X1950 pro just died on me after only a year, and my current 4870 has a dodgy, extremely noisy, but functional fan. It sounds like theres grit in the "bearing sleeve" when the fan starts from cold, and lasts for about 5 minutes. Another really wierd thing it seems to do, is create "interferrance" on the monitor, and a loud, horrible "garbled" noise whenever I play 3D games. The noise gets louder and changes, depending on what I'm looking at.

 

Lol I checked on Newegg (dont know if they even ship to UK), but EVERY single gtx 470 is out of stock... All 45 different versions of them. I found a "GTX 560TI 1GB Direct CUII" for less than £200. Its a bit out of my price range at the mo, but I've got my eyes on that one.

 

Anyway, thanks again for the advice, I'll see what I can find. Definitely nVidea this time. ATI, in my personal experience have turned out to be a terrible manufacturer...

Edited April 29, 2012 by shuriken88