Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: PC Performance, Benchmarked

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Ultra Detail, 4x MSAA Plus Transparent/Adaptive AA

If you want to address transparent textures without applying FXAA’s blurring effect, transparency AA is the way to go. Use Nvidia’s Transparent AA and AMD’s Adaptive AA technologies.

Keep in mind that these techniques are similar, but yield a different result. Nvidia’s TrSSAA causes a larger performance hit, but does a better job of smoothing foliage edges in this particular game when movement is involved.

At ultra details with transparency anti-aliasing and 4x MSAA, only the fastest cards like AMD's Radeon HD 6970, Nvidia's GeForce GTX 570, and its GeForce GTX 460 in SLI provide playable frame rates.

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191 Comments Comment from the forums

xx12amanxx

Ive been a fan of the Elderscroll series for years i look forward to playing this!
Reply
Jarmo

A bit disappointing to see the 2 threads thing, no doubt the console versions are much better optimized.
Looks like I'm both CPU and GPU limited with Phenom x4 and ATI 4870.
Reply
lunyone

A bit disappointing to see the 2 threads thing, no doubt the console versions are much better optimized.
Looks like I'm both CPU and GPU limited with Phenom x4 and ATI 4870.
Well with a Athlon II x3 450 and an AMD 4850 512mb GPU w/6 gb's of DDR2 it seems to work fine. The game has picked "Ultra" settings when launching the game the first time. I haven't seen all of the settings that the game has selected, but the game looks pretty good and is running quite well. I haven't run any FRAPS on it, but it seems to be about 30-40 FPS, from what I can tell, which is good enough for me :)
Reply
lunyone

Oh and forgot to mention that the game is running at 1920 x 1080 resolution (unless the game adjusted to something different). I'm trying to play and post, so I'm a bit distracted to say the least. I'll post back if something changes :)
Reply
computadoro

O well, was hoping to see the 560ti and 6950 tested as those are the two cards I was going to choose between.
Reply
cleeve

9522636 said:
O well, was hoping to see the 560ti and 6950 tested as those are the two cards I was going to choose between.

Just look at 6850/GTX460 and 6970/GTX 570. The 560 Ti and 6950 will be in the middle of those, closer to the higher end though.
Reply
Swolern

Bethesda disappoints PC gamers again! It's very sad that Bethesda chooses to optimize the consoles and leaves PC with a basic port with a little extra detail. I'm not saying it's not a great game because it is, but the thought of what it could have been if Bethesda put a little extra effort into the PC makes me sick!
Reply
Swolern

Bethesda=Activision. Dice blows em both away!
Reply
koogco

I havent played this yet, due to a pending CPU upgrade (somehow i doubt my athlon x2 5600+ (2,8ghz) is enough for much.
But even if this game doesn't quite push the top cards, you gotta commend them for the great scaling! Some of the worst console ports doesn't even HAVE graphics settings, in other games the settings make little difference in the hardware needed, and based on these screenshots (if rather small, larger ones please!) the game looks almost as good if you turn the settings down some.

Reply
Man looks really castrated so it can work on xbox/ps3. Too bad, 5 year old graphics are lame.
Reply