I'm loving the thieves guild quest line, definitely the best one in Skyrim IMO. The whole game feels quite different, going from my argonian conjuror who sat back during most fights to a khajit thief who's in the thick of things at all times. Might have enough interest left in the game to go with another toon, a nord berserker, especially if the DLC is meaty.
TES V: Skyrim
- Thread starter Frank
- Start date
I beat the main quest and did a fair amount of side quests with only an occasional bug like crashing to the desktop. Nothing serious to corrupt my game. I wouldn't let a worry of bugs keep you from buying it.
Yeah, when the INI is left untweaked, I have only encountered a small handful of bugs -- and those were all 'older' releases of the codebase. I've edited the INI files to use the higher uGrids settings, and those invariably lead to some level of crashing at random points. I can play with uGrids=11 and all the shadowmaps sized at 8192k along with 4xSSAA and all the other graphics at max, but it will crash to desktop at least once per hour if not more.
Back out the uGrids settings, and it will be stable for an entire eight-hour session. This old engine just doesn't play nicely when you whack out the visibility level...
Back out the uGrids settings, and it will be stable for an entire eight-hour session. This old engine just doesn't play nicely when you whack out the visibility level...
Does this game have full-time TrMSAA when MSAA is enabled? I've been pondering this because the foliage looks fairly clean even with just plain MSAA enabled (no FXAA). Fallout 3 had TrMSAA in the options but since it's not in the options this time I've been wondering if it's just always-on.
Also, it blows my mind that the game engine can have fits of stuttering at times when running on a i5 @ 4.3, 16GB RAM, game on a Crucial m4, and a 6950@6970. It seems like something goes out of sync in the engine. Also, apparently there is some sort of 64 Hz frame rate limitation to the engine? I read that while looking up stuttering remedies. Good old Gamebryo. I know we as gamers are accustomed to stuttering, but I think it's something that needs to become less acceptable to PC developers. It reminds me of Carmack's keynote and his ragging on video card drivers and APIs and Windows and how it all makes fluidity extremely difficult.
Also, it blows my mind that the game engine can have fits of stuttering at times when running on a i5 @ 4.3, 16GB RAM, game on a Crucial m4, and a 6950@6970. It seems like something goes out of sync in the engine. Also, apparently there is some sort of 64 Hz frame rate limitation to the engine? I read that while looking up stuttering remedies. Good old Gamebryo.
I know we as gamers are accustomed to stuttering, but I think it's something that needs to become less acceptable to PC developers. It reminds me of Carmack's keynote and his ragging on video card drivers and APIs and Windows and how it all makes fluidity extremely difficult.Skyrim FPS took a real nosedive on my box with the march* catalysts; before I upgraded the game had become quite fluid these last couple patches (after Bethy stopped being a little less incompetent and enabled compiler optimizations, lol), but now it's like it's running at 30fps or something. Very irritating, I can't play the game at all when it's behaving like that.
*Edit.
Haven't dared installing the 11.4s to see if it remedies the low FPS issue, considering all the serious issues people have been reporting with them.
*Edit.
Haven't dared installing the 11.4s to see if it remedies the low FPS issue, considering all the serious issues people have been reporting with them.
I'm guessing it might be a video card thing, as I don't get any stutters on my i7 @ 4.3, 16gb ram with a 580.
Does this game have full-time TrMSAA when MSAA is enabled? I've been pondering this because the foliage looks fairly clean even with just plain MSAA enabled (no FXAA). Fallout 3 had TrMSAA in the options but since it's not in the options this time I've been wondering if it's just always-on.
Also, it blows my mind that the game engine can have fits of stuttering at times when running on a i5 @ 4.3, 16GB RAM, game on a Crucial m4, and a 6950@6970. It seems like something goes out of sync in the engine. Also, apparently there is some sort of 64 Hz frame rate limitation to the engine? I read that while looking up stuttering remedies. Good old Gamebryo.
A. Doesn't use Gamebryo anymore.
B. The game has a fuckton of scripts and stuff to call at pretty much any time, much more than Oblivion. Stutters are to be expected for a very long time.
No, it's a known issue with the 64Hz simulation rate versus a 60Hz vsync cap. It's hardware and driver agnostic and is a "feature" of the engine. It's been that way since Morrowind, into Oblivion, both Fallout 3's, and now Skyrim. Which then leads us to this next humorous snippet:
Right. And I drive a Datsun to work every day. Oh wait, I mean a Nissan. What's the difference? Pretty much a rebranding effort over the course of a few years and nothing else. Name me a single Gamebryo glitch that didn't come over into Skyrim. And then name me a single Gamebryo glitch from the prior games that got fixed with Skyrim.
Here's one you can use: compiler optimizations actually got fixed in Skryim, but only after someone else did the work and stuffed it into Bethesda's face. It's odd how the engine is soooo new, and yet has exactly the same failures, features, configurations, and asset dataset formats as all prior engines. Taking Visual Studio 2010 debugger to the skryim.exe even yields the same variable names for a ton of methods and functions.
It still uses Gamebryo, it just has some spit-shine.
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I still use Oblivion Stutter Remover (a very fancy framerate limiter) on this modern i5 setup because otherwise that game will still stutter too.
The engine might have a new name, but the feel of the game and the underlying look of things is still clearly an iteration of the same tech as Fallout 3 and Oblivion. I don't really mind, aside from the stuttering bouts, because it's mature technology that works and so they can focus on content unlike the relative technological mess that was Oblivion. But they do need to dump some of their riches into some programmers who can make a modern renderer for next round I think.
How do you know this? Is it mentioned somewhere in an interview or some such? I figured they just streamlined it a bit and went with more complex assets this time because of how much more powerful even 4 year old graphics cards are than what was around in 2006. The new dynamic shadows look like what they were experimenting with before Oblivion came out.
You realize the company who held Gamebryo licensing during the tenure of Skyrims' developemtn (Emergent Technologies) is in the trademark usage credits for Skyrim, right?
You also realize that Gamebryo IS in fact provably in Skyrim, right? Specifically:
- Gamebryo File Format, Version 20.2.0.7
- NiAnimation Gamebryo Version 2.2.0.0
- NiMain Gamebryo Version 2.2.0.0
- NiSystem Gamebryo Version 2.2.0.0
- NiDX9 Gamebryo Version 2.2.0.0
- NiParticle Gamebryo Version 2.2.0.0
Yeah, it's pretty clearly Gamebryo, just like they pretty clearly didn't invent a new texture compression algorithm. the texture streaming is pretty awesome tho!
To anyone still interested, I'd say Skyrim runs quite well, better than Oblivion ever did, for me. There are some quest bugs and stuff but they're quite easy to work around (and not usually present in important quests). One important thing that I don't see enough people mention is that if you want to play Skyrim on High settings, you need win7 64. It drove me almost crazy trying to trouvleshoot our graphics card issues until I figured that out. The game will get to a certain point, which is the confusing part, then try to address a bit too much memory, and crash quite reliably. Win64 shores that right up tho!
the texture streaming is pretty awesome tho!To anyone still interested, I'd say Skyrim runs quite well, better than Oblivion ever did, for me. There are some quest bugs and stuff but they're quite easy to work around (and not usually present in important quests). One important thing that I don't see enough people mention is that if you want to play Skyrim on High settings, you need win7 64. It drove me almost crazy trying to trouvleshoot our graphics card issues until I figured that out. The game will get to a certain point, which is the confusing part, then try to address a bit too much memory, and crash quite reliably. Win64 shores that right up tho!
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Oblivion began to run very well once you had a 8800/2900, as long as you also had a top-end Athlon 64 X2 or better. It's very CPU dependent. Skyrim is definitely more demanding, but since we have hardware that is so much faster now it's easy to get the impression that it's more optimized. It's more that high-end CPU/GPU hardware from the past few years is simply beyond the game's needs. An 8800GT can run the game pretty well at High detail with a moderate resolution, until its 512MB of RAM becomes inadequate in some locations.
Skyrim is large address aware. That's why a x64 OS solves crashes. This is something else that Bethesda patched in post release after the community woke them up. Initially there were exe hacks to enable it. There's a hack for this for Oblivion and Fallout 3.
Skyrim is large address aware. That's why a x64 OS solves crashes. This is something else that Bethesda patched in post release after the community woke them up. Initially there were exe hacks to enable it. There's a hack for this for Oblivion and Fallout 3.
Ah I wonder if that's it becasue I scratch my head at all the issues I read. I'm running Skyrim on a 16gb Win7 64 machine and have had zero issues, no stuttering, no crashes, no problems at all, it's just been all shockingly smooth. In fact I don't even remember the last time any game crashed on me, not once in 2012 that's for sure, everything just runs perfectly. Then again I don't mod the games nor do I tweak ini's, I just put all setttings to max that the game itself allows.
