amd graphics cards or nvidias for skyrim

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Only Nvidia cards allow you to force Ambient Occlusion on Skyrim. This adds more depth and realism to shadows in the game and produces a higher quality image throughout. Yes, the image quality of Skyrim on Nvidia cards is better. In the image below, Skyrim on AMD cards looks like the "AO: OFF" screenshot.

Skyrim-AO-Comparison.gif

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/guides/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-tweak-guide#19
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sora

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Oct 30, 2013
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This. The 780 would easily max out Skyrim on pretty much every mod unless you had a 4k monitor.
 
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jeffredo

jeffredo

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Nov 15, 2008
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I have a GTX 670 (which is more than capable of maxing Skyrim), but Ambient Occlusion on "quality" is kind of an FPS hit in some areas (and "performance" isn't really worth bothering with). I prefer to leave it off to keep more smooth and fluid FPS. In addition, I have a secondary PC with an OC'd HD 7850 2GB. It plays Skyrim beautifully as well - I really don't have a preference between the two.

That said, for Skyrim on Ultra (with HD textures) anything from an R9 270 or GTX 660 on up should be able to do it very well (for monitors of 1440p or less).
 
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Quest_Skyrim

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Oct 10, 2013
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As far as I know this also depends on what kind of mods you are planning to use. Some mods support their own image quality improvement. Take a look at YT and realvision to get an idea of what to expect.
 
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nikoli707

nikoli707

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Jan 4, 2012
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boris's original enb over at enbdev.com will add ambient occlusion, inject smaa, and add a host of other dx10 effects like water caustics and volumetric shading. the enb also does hbao much better performance and quality wise than nvidia forced settings. so you do not need an nvidia card at all to enjoy "dx10 like' skyrim, amd cards handle it very well. also the memory management built into the enb can cut vram load down almost in half in some cases, especially with heavy mods.

maxing out vanilla skyrim@1080p using the stock enb enabling smaa and af doesn't require much horsepower at all, say an fx6300/i5 quad and a hd7870/gtx660. running a full s.t.e.p. highest possible quality mod install@1440p will require an overclocked amd fx 8 core or overclocked intel 4 core and an r9-290 or gtx780.
 
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