Looks great to me. Not stunning ala BF3 but more than good enough to get across that amazing sense of adventure that I loved Oblivion for.
Archive Thread of Screenshots of Ridunkulous Quality and Size [2007-2015]
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1GB outdoors it's with 4x MSAA and FXAA enabled, indoors (dungeons) typical usage is 1.4GB of VRAM (drops to 1GB)
Agree w/ many points above: this game needs SSAO, some kind of parallax mapping techinique on the ground textures, and better shadow mapping techniques. Shadowing is inconsistent too, the main hall of the Jarl in Whiterun has a huge bon-fire in the middle but not a single shadow in that portion of the room. I generally dislike how washed-out the colors of the open world look; I know it's set in Skyrim and it's supposed to be cold but it'd be nice if characters, buildings... all non landscape objects popped out a little more from the open world backgrounds (SSAO / POM would help a lot). I guess I can wait for a user generated patch to enable all of these things and then some; I'm also hoping AMD releases one of its 30%+ boost in performance drivers for this game; it's bringing my 6950 to its knees at 1900x1200 4xAA 8xAF and it doesn't look good enough to warrant this much of a drop. HardOCP echoes this sentiment of low Radeon performance w/ its preview.
That said, the mountains shrouded in mist look amazing though and NPC behaviors seem more bustling, organic, and believable. There's a lot to this game's credit for sure.
That said, the mountains shrouded in mist look amazing though and NPC behaviors seem more bustling, organic, and believable. There's a lot to this game's credit for sure.
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For a game targeted to consoles, they did a fantastic job. But this also means most PC problems are precisely due to console limitations. Characters have pretty low-res normal maps too, you can stare at some of the female faces and notice distinct banding ridges on the tip of the nose; self shadowing is just a joke w/ the resolution of shadow map that they use. (I also found a borked Radiant Story script, Carlotta Velentia is just stuck staring at her daughter in the market in Whiterun, and the game can drop existing object like dragon skeletons in pretty random places when you load making for some creepy moments when you see the writhing bones suddenly appear.)
I have noticed the dragon-bone issue a couple times. Twice they've dropped from the sky, and once came up from under the ground, and rather slowly.. looked like the skeleton was being "birthed" right there in the road. Wished I would have recorded it, it was weird.
The shadow tip above worked out pretty well for me, at least for outside shadows. Shadows inside seem to be the same as they've always been.
The shadow tip above worked out pretty well for me, at least for outside shadows. Shadows inside seem to be the same as they've always been.
Here are some of the issues I mentioned. Notice the obvious banding on the face and the Morrowind era textures on the clothing. I also hate the washed out color palette (I guess we're in Skyrim) and the lack of "pop" on the background. The background objects could use a dash of SSAO and POM:
Lack of shadows in Whitehall:
and a room away, dripping w/ shadows:
the game is gorgeous at the right time of day just like in real life, but I'd have preferred it to be lovely most of the time instead of washed out 3/4 of the time when it suffers from "realismitis." A lovely sunset after a rain:
and the super low resolution self shadowing:
I'm running at 1680x1050 no AA or AF on a 6950 w/ an i5 2500k and getting 40+ fps. It doesn't look as nice as say BF3 and I can run that at 1920x1200 w/ eye-candy (admittedly it's a less ambitious engine in terms of world scope).
Lack of shadows in Whitehall:
and a room away, dripping w/ shadows:
the game is gorgeous at the right time of day just like in real life, but I'd have preferred it to be lovely most of the time instead of washed out 3/4 of the time when it suffers from "realismitis." A lovely sunset after a rain:
and the super low resolution self shadowing:
I'm running at 1680x1050 no AA or AF on a 6950 w/ an i5 2500k and getting 40+ fps. It doesn't look as nice as say BF3 and I can run that at 1920x1200 w/ eye-candy (admittedly it's a less ambitious engine in terms of world scope).
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This site offers a nice ini generator:
http://donotargue.com/cfg-makers/skyrim/
I have no idea what half of these options actually do, but I know that this game doesn't give you too much mileage from tweaking its ini. Not that I'm complaining, it looking nice by default is great.
The Frostbite 2 engine is capable of some truly vast landscapes. No matter what Bethesda has said, Skyrim is using the same renderer they've been using since Oblivion. NVIDIA SSAO working in Skyrim with the Fallout 3 profile is evidence enough.
I was truly hoping for a new engine. Gamebryo never was impressive, and in 2011 it's laughable.
BTW the first pic you posted with that woman staring at you scared the piss out of me. I was sitting real close to the monitor and BOOM - there she was in my face. Yikes.
Haha, close up view is ofcourse to enhance artifacts... though she is creepy looking even w/o the artifacts. Maybe she's a goth nord or something about to go to a big concert.
Even though I'm griping, the game itself is a lot of fun; combat feels more visceral, the world more alive, and that sense of wonderful strangeness is there like it was in Morrowind. The graphics are quite good and that's all they have to be; maybe they're trying to back away from the uncanny valley. As a gaming fan, I'd prefer that they spend their coin on gameplay and writing rather than just graphics. (And maybe a better PC port in the future, in particular wtf is up w/ the interface? I can't sort by weight, do inventory management, or use my mouse cursor to click some menu entries or spin the item model around which does work w/ the xbox controller plugged in.)
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Btw, to all playing Skyrim: http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?p=1597957#post1597957
You should adjust your shadow map resolution "iShadowMapResolution=4096" and adjust "fShadowDistance=2000.0000" which I've found work well for my Radeon 6950; the effect of this is like upping the resolution of a projector and moving it closer to the wall you're projecting your picture on, improving resolution per unit of game space. The iShadowMapResolution variable is the resolution of your projector LCD and the distance is how far it is to the wall. Don't make the distance too small or only a few object near you will take a shadow.
Also, for some reason Catalyst drivers enabled Morphological Filtering by default on my rig; I knew there was something wrong when straight lines had these little pixel artifacts along them. 2x speedup by disabling this and I can now use vsync.
You should adjust your shadow map resolution "iShadowMapResolution=4096" and adjust "fShadowDistance=2000.0000" which I've found work well for my Radeon 6950; the effect of this is like upping the resolution of a projector and moving it closer to the wall you're projecting your picture on, improving resolution per unit of game space. The iShadowMapResolution variable is the resolution of your projector LCD and the distance is how far it is to the wall. Don't make the distance too small or only a few object near you will take a shadow.
Also, for some reason Catalyst drivers enabled Morphological Filtering by default on my rig; I knew there was something wrong when straight lines had these little pixel artifacts along them. 2x speedup by disabling this and I can now use vsync.
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Alright. Almost certainly I'm not going to be the only one taking pictures around this place.
Yeah took a few screenshots there, stunning place with the lighting effects and that tree.
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