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Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: PC Performance, Benchmarked

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The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion redefined our expectations for open world fantasy RPGs, and it was brutally hard on the hardware of its day. Is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim as challenging on today's PC hardware, or can a modest rig handle it?

Ultra Detail, 4x MSAA Plus FXAA

While 4x MSAA is nice, it doesn’t smooth out transparent texture aliasing, and there are a lot of trees and plants in Skyrim that can really use some help with their leaves. FXAA reduces those artifacts at the expense of blurring other details in the scene slightly.

FXAA requires relatively little extra processing power, as we can see from frame rates that are similar to the 4x MSAA results.

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti and Radeon HD 5770 have to work a little harder here and end up skirting the wrong side of a 30 FPS minimum at 1080p.

The Radeon HD 6850 and GeForce GTX 460 are humbled, but still playable. And the Radeon HD 6970, GeForce GTX 570, and GeForce GTX 460 SLI combo continue to deliver smooth performance.

191 Comments Comment from the forums
  • xx12amanxx 11 November 2011 13:20
    Ive been a fan of the Elderscroll series for years i look forward to playing this!
    Reply
  • Jarmo 11 November 2011 13:21
    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 11 November 2011 13:27
    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 11 November 2011 13:30
    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 11 November 2011 14:00
    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 11 November 2011 14:02
    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 11 November 2011 14:16
    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 11 November 2011 14:18
    Bethesda=Activision. Dice blows em both away!
    Reply
  • koogco 11 November 2011 15:35
    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
  • 11 November 2011 15:42
    Man looks really castrated so it can work on xbox/ps3. Too bad, 5 year old graphics are lame.
    Reply