TES V: Skyrim

Skyrim, or How Not to Make a PC Game

 

AMD has problems with crossfire, for maybe the first week the game is out, and its OH NO, AMD SUCKS. I wonder why the same people complaining here, never said a world about nvidia with stuttering drivers in fallout 3 for over a year?

http://nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=141722

 

It's not the Crossfire problems that worry me. Read the conclusion page.

 

I have played for 20 hour now, and have not seen any flashing textures. I did have some stuttering issues, not many, but the dll file I mentioned early has fixed that.

 

I spent some time trying AA modes on my 6950.

-2xEQ SSAA is quite nice. It's a lot faster than 4X and better quality than just 2X. At my test spot in the game it was 60 fps vs. ~45 fps for 4X SSAA.
SSAA speed: 2x > 2xEQ > 4x > 4xEQ=4x edge detect > 4xEQ+edge detect > 8x
-Adaptive MSAA looks great but causes flashing and transparent/translucent textures. Performance is somewhat faster than SSAA but it's clearly more demanding than plain MSAA. They should have natively supported MSAA+TAA as it approaches SSAA quality in this game (shader aliasing not bad).

I'm leaving FXAA off I think because I don't like what it does to alpha textures like the tree leaves.

Also I've noticed that the game seems to become very CPU bound I think in towns because you can see a lot of geometry at one time. It's the same as with Oblivion, especially mods like Better Cities. It can make the 3 GHz Q6600 chug a bit. This game appears to be at most using 2 cores.

 

So where is L233? I need my review since im wary of buying this after the Oblivion fiasco.

 

I don't think there's a chance in hell L233 would do anything but complain about the game.

If you ask me, if you didn't like the overall direction the series went with Oblivion, to the point that you actually didn't enjoy that game, then you probably shouldn't bother. If you were annoyed by Oblivion but still ended up enjoying it overall, especially later with mods, then you should definitely take the plunge.

Me, I enjoyed Oblivion quite a lot. The game wasn't perfect, not by a long shot, but it removed a lot of the headaches of Morrowind while at the same time dramatically reducing the gameplay loopholes that allowed you to make silly god-like characters with very little time or effort (once you knew what to do). The combat was also made significantly more fun. So I can't wait until I can start in on Skyrim around the end of this week.

 

Graphics and performance of this game are a bad joke...but I love this game

 

Hehe I just did some simple benchmarking and it seems that shadows are a resource hog and the game loves cpu. All the others settings, well on my 6870 I can turn off AA/AAF or turn it all the way up and it wont make 1fps difference. Overclocking my q6600 from 2.4ghz to 3ghz gives 5~7fps extra and turning shadows from ultra to high (and if you ask me, I couldnt see a difference) gives about the same gain. Al measured infront of the riverwood town entrence. On default ultra settings @ 2.4ghz I get 21fps there.

Btw is there any way I can turn off vsync? I tried changing the .ini files like the internet told me to do but that doesnt work.

 

That may be true, but I admit I rather enjoy a well written rant every now and again.

 

Force off in video card control panel.

 

I don't get this stance at all.

I have a four year old Q9550 at 3.6Ghz and a last-generation 5850 1Gb at 900/1150 that can play this game at Ultra everything and 2xSSAA at 1680x1050. Just to see, I set stock clocks for the system and tried again. The SSAA isn't as comfortable, and shadows certainly take their toll at stock speeds, but it's still entirely playable with ultra everything except for shadows.

Insofar as the graphics? This is worlds better than oblivion, there were quite a few mods to Oblivion that didn't look this good. Which pieces specifically a "bad joke", and can you provide an example of another sandbox, open-world game that does it better?

I'm not here to apologize for all the obvious errors in Skyrim (there are plenty of issues, to be sure), but graphics and performance are NOT an issue that I can understand people complaining about.

Back to my own gaming: I am really, really tired of the insane wolves, bears and sabercats in this game. I had four wolves attacking me while on a horse I stole, so I jumped off the horse and was dispatching the wolves with the basic fireball spell you get when you start. Turns out I somehow it the horse, and then the effing horse was chasing me all over the world trying to kill me.

The horse got low on life and decided to flee, so I figured that was done and I could walk the rest of the way. Turns out the horse regenerated health (WTF?) and then came back to kick my ass again! WTF? Why does a horse hold a grudge, and why didn't it flee when it was on fire? Most wildlife, I would think, would do something similar. That is, if they weren't programmed to always attack on-sight.

I had a single CTD yesterday after about 30 minutes of play, but I think it was related to an overheated graphics card. The core temp had gone all the way to 95* when it crashed, which is highly out of the norm for my setup. The automatic fan profile was somehow disabled in the MSI Afterburner app, and was set statically to like 31% so it was slowly cooking itself. I put the fan profile back in, and never once had any other issues.

 

Stop burning your steeds. LOL!

 

Maybe it was pissed because I stole it and then had the audacity to burn it?

 

For me the shadows are a bad joke, but I am pretty sure it is a bug and it will be fixed in a patch. Faces are better than Oblivion and the distant landscape LOD is good, I think.

 

Doesn't work either.

 

Seems like it is an AMD problem. Earlier someone posted a link to a hardocp article comparing Skyrim out-of-the-box experiences with an AMD card and an NV card.

 

Ok, I can certainly agree with that. Shadows are certainly shit-tastic, and jarringly so. But everything else seems to be at least on par with any other sandbox you can name today, and worlds better (ha) than Oblivion.

My AMD experience, out of the box, has been damned good. It must be a crossfire thing, or else something specific to the 6000-series of cards that isn't affecting the 5850 and, I just checked, isn't affecting the 5650M in my laptop either. And I'm using 11.9's on the desktop and 11.4's on the laptop, so I don't know if maybe a driver issue is causing it? Or just some other hardware fluke?

 

I have no idea. All I know is that on HIGH at 1920x1200, my GTX285 feels good. 2xMSAA and 16xAF (a must). Shadows are on low because they look like crap anyway and I don't want to waste perf. on a bug.

I am not really sure if I want to have FXAA on or not, I have just turned it off so let's see.

Edit: also, one more thing that is appallingly bad, the jarring flickering effect on shadows when the sun changes position. It looks superbad.

 

Yeah, I lumped the flickering shadows during time-of-day changes under the general "shittastic shadows" category But it gets REALLY distracting on relatively flat walls when the whole wall does the window-blinds effect during the transition.

They really, really need to fix shadows.

I want to do a bit more testing with my laptop -- i5-540m + ATI 5650M 1Gb that overclocks well. It isn't going to muster SSAA, but it only has to drive a 1366x768 screen so I bet i can get quite a bit out of it anyway. The default "high" settings for everything were decently playable, but I think shadows are choking the CPU. I'll play with it a bit more tonight after my day's planned activities.