Nvidia Launches Two Tweak Guides for Skyrim

That is handy.

Thats what I love about PC gaming, zillions of ways to tweak and get the most out of your unique hardware.

How about AMD, did they make a guide for their cards too?

It took them 3 weeks just to get the beta crossfire drivers released. They're not gonna release any guide.

Nice that Nvidia is providing the guides. Getting the maximum performance out of a video card is tricky on the PC with the number of GPUs/CPUs/RAM types.

On the Xbox360 the game looked great but the gameplay wasn't. The AI has really horrible navigation issues. Lots of opponents get stuck on edges or behind small movable objects. Managed to fall out of the map by climbing the wall at the end of the Southfringe Sanctum. On the other hand, blasting dragon corpses 1000s of yards over mountains with a fireball is fun.

personally, i just wish every game just worked right the moment i put it in.

i mean feed the game what i have. than give me the options and show me a projected fps.

do i want the best graphics
do i want better graphics than my card can handle fast
do i want the best at 30fps
do i want 60fps
do i want the lowest setting so i can go really really fast...

and im not really talking about dumbing the graphics interface down, what im talking about is a game developer should have certain presets for each card... it cant be that much work, you more or less know how cards preform, make the game know what would look best at certain frame rates...

i hate how when im given the choice, how every time my graphics settings are put to mid range, when i have yet to play a game that i couldn't max on my 5770 at 1920x1200 with shadows turned off, and no aa. (i dont have battle field 3 but that is one, and if you don't have a retardedly far draw disntacen in skyrim, you can basicly max that too)

i mean look at the toms Hierarchy chart. i had a 6800 ultra and oblivion played like crap on it, so lets assume thats the minimum.

that would be about 17 graphic levels pre tweaked for your gaming experience, and they know better than anyone what their engine can do, do you don't spend an hour or so figuring out what is the best you can play at and still get decent frame rates.

games not working 100% of the time, and the initial tweak is probably the only two things i don't like about gaming on the pc.

Even if the game developer could take into consideration some graphic cards, they could not account for all the different hardrive, ssd, CPU, motherboard, drivers, etc... that people might be using. An Xbox 360 and a PS3 are constants. It is difficult to program for all the possible PC configurations people might have. I don't mind making some tweaks to get the game running the way I want it to on my machine.

Good that Nvidia is thinking about the consumers.

Nvidia: Because you damn kids bitch too much about FPS or image quality.

You make it seem like gaming on a PC is way more complicated. There are really only two additional steps to game on a PC.
1. Install the game. I don't get what's to complain about this. You basically push the "next button" 6 times.
2. Adjust image quality. Usually either low, medium, high, and ultra.

That's really all you need to do differently. Its really not that different and I don't see it as something to complain about.

Good doing...could we have one for BF3 too please?

Already released
http://www.geforce.com/Optimize/Gu [...] weak-guide

In fact there are 2 more on the site but they are related to beta.NVIDIA FTW

Ah thanks. Hope it helps stop it from crashing the way it has been since the patch, though i doubt.

that's also a minus when it comes to PC gaming...

ZILLIONS of tweaks for each and every unique hardware...

with consoles, you just play...mostly....

but with PC, there can be so many things that can go wrong...and some people don't like to or have the knowledge to "tweak" settings...

as a person who loves computing, electronics, and gadgets, PC gaming is "superior" than console games but I can see merits of having only ONE hardware to deal with....

Thats cool and all but I finished the game like 3 days ago. 160+ quests.

Well done NVIDIA. Can't help but think AMD needs to divert a little more resources into developing similar guides, perhaps even employing the help of enthusiast gamers.

You make me laugh, if you just want to play then install the game and play and if you can't even handle that well i guess no hardware in the universe is stupidified enough for your "needs". What the PC version offer is the possibility to tweak if you like meaning you get a CHOOICE rather than just play on the standard settings. The only merit of one ancient console design (by todays pc gaming standards) is that the devs can be lazy and settle for poor to medicre image quality (at best) and still get away with it! The PC's DX API's makes development easy and scalling is not as hard as it used to be especially not compared to back in the days when you had to code a specific path for each 3d chip.

When did Koroush Ghazi become so partisan!??!

This tweak:

http://international.download.nvid [...] son-1.html

Is an example of SSD advantages over HD. setting far away textures puts a heavy load on storage speed, and SSD allow far better quality that HDs.

Common game benchmarks do not reflect this kind of advantage, just because games are not optimized to take advantage of it. But after tweak, SSD performance can be squeezed on a way that is just out of reach for HDs.

ATI: "I was going to release a similar Tweak Guide, but then I took an arrow to the knee"

The merit for a crappier graphical experience.
The merit of longer load times.
The merit of using a controller with a very limited number of inputs.
The merit of using an analog stick instead of a mouse.
The merit of having glitches that you can't tweak to fix.
The only real merit for console gaming is that it's cheaper. Unless you include a decent high def television.

Interesting fact i found in the guide. It seems that the Ultra textures setting wants 500MB of VRAM for itself. And the dude says that the Ultra preset has GPUs with around 1.5 GB VRAM in mind.

Time to redo that 6950 1GB vs 2GB article, i guess?

Well, you have to buy a decent high def television/monitor for PC gaming too, so that point is irrelevant.

You kids can debate on PC vs. consoles all you want, as a gamer who's been around since the Commodore 64, I can assure you PC and consoles will always coexist. For me, it's a matter of genre. I enjoy action, driving and sports game on console while I play FPS and RPG on my PC.

I'll admit that tweaking a game in order to have the best graphics at a smooth framerate is starting to bum me off. The little time I have for gaming these days, I want to actually play a game rather than tweak it. Still, I find that most games handle automatic settings based on hardware pretty well.

backward flying dragons, duplicate stable master with one stuck half-way into the ground, random crash to desktop, and other fantastic bugs awaits you in the world of skyrim! also, this guide is a massive advertisement for nvidia. it gets mentioned like every other sentence.

Skyrim aside. Does any of this actually make the game better? nVidia can help to mitigate any potential damage to its own reputation by covering for poor developer choices (like DX v OpenGL) and sloppy coding but they simply can't tweak a good game from a bad game. That's conceptual; and a game has it or hasn't. Your choice of PC or gaming hardware will never alter that fact.

Pretty handy guide. I knew most of it, but some of it is definitely a good point of reference, especially with shadows. I had read numerous times that iblurdeferredshadows maxes out at 32, but they're saying it's only 7. I'll definitely have to test that one out tonight. I think it's a much better way of improving shadows than increasing the resolution, because there's a much less dramatic FPS hit.

That ugridstoload is a great tweak but sadly it also greatly reduces performance. My rig can handle it at 7, but when at 9 my FPS drops dramatically - and yet GPU usage doesn't really change much, which tells me it's a CPU limited thing for whatever reason. Either that, or AMD's CFX is still not working properly. I'm sure they can get a lot more scaling out of it, anyway.

"The only real merit for console gaming is that it's cheaper. Unless you include a decent high def television."

Its not even cheaper when you start to add a bunch games into the mix and they are more expensive on consoled, only the unit is cheaper but the player pays down range instead. Unlike the pc where the entry level hardware is a tad more expensive at start but then earn it downrange (and with way better gfx ect) and thats not even including the possibility to upgrade rather than get a complete new system. The choice was really easy for me.

I strongly recommend reading this guide to everyone (including those with AMD GPUs). I have a notebook with HD 5650 GPU & Core i7 CPU and the game performance was poor before i read this guide. After i read and did the tweaks in the guide, my game looked MUCH better and also i got higher FPS

Pretty much all of the advice and graphs in the nVidia guide should hold true for ATI cards as well.
I don't find either brand of card to be better than the other... I only buy ATI because I know their product line much better than nVidia's, and am therefore more educated and comfortable as to what exactly I'm buying.

That wouldn't be due to NV's annoying and confusing naming schemes, would it?

I actually think nVidia's naming scheme is much more logical than AMD. The only card they have right now that doesnt really make sense is the 560 TI 448 core.