It's time to get... serious.

"You know you're addicted to Skyrim when..."

...you buy [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] for the express purpose of playing it.

No, I'm not kidding -- after 170 hours of playing this game, I felt it was time to take it... well, to Sovngarde level, as it were. 3 gigabytes of video memory enough for ya, Bethesda? Nearly 4 TFLOPS of processing power? Does this satisfy you? HUH? DOES IT?!

Indeed it does. I realized that even with other hardware that is considered now to be legacy (a Core2 Duo E8400 and 8GB of DDR2 RAM, and the memory's slowed down to 889MHz for stability), I can now run Skyrim with every single setting at maximum. It certainly helps that I have the CPU ridiculously overclocked (how's 3.6 -> 4.2GHz sound?) thanks to enough heatsink square footage to build a copper shrine to Mehrunes Dagon, but the video card takes everything the game throws at it and is hungry for more.

And I threw everything at it I could think of. All the sliders to the right, every checkbox checked. HD textures, enhanced water and distant terrain textures, detailed object textures, more snow, more rain, Detailed Cities, trees in Whiterun, more blood, 4096x4096 shadows, the whole kit & caboodle. And it's effortless. I can climb the Throat of the World and see the College of Winterhold halfway across the map. 60fps, everywhere.

Screenshots to be posted in the coming days. I would have had a bunch of them by now, but I just made a new character (a Khajiit who's such a heinous murder-thief, he totally deserved to get beheaded in Helgen -- seriously, he kills EEEEEEEEVERRRRRYYYYYYYYOOOOOOOONNNNNNNE) and I was too busy marveling at the megaultrasuper scenerygasm to press F12.

That is some video card! Can't wait to see some screenshots, though video would be even more amazing

Here's Chattus at level 12, north of Riften in the hot springs in the early morning:

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Mistwatch

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Very nice!

ENB enabled now.

THIS IS A VIDEO GAME SCREENSHOT.

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No, that's a couple of hours drive from my house! I've been there! Wonderful weather and great for canoeing.

Dude, my pc can't even run Skyrim, but THIS!?!?!

I'm jealous, man... holy crap. I always said the difference between Skyrim on PC and Xbox wasn't that different, but this!?!?!?

I'm just gonna go back to my Atari 2600 now...

Chysonallite wrote:Dude, my pc can't even run Skyrim, but THIS!?!?!

It's not perfect. Outdoor scenes during the day are now photorealistic -- I've fooled three people at work today so far into thinking that screenshot is a photograph -- but there are odd glitches in other parts of the game. My Khajiit's night vision doesn't work anymore, for one thing, and I use that power extensively when in dungeons and during night prowling. So there are tradeoffs.

Also, even with a thermanukular-hollycost video card like this one, playing with all these high-resolution thingies enabled is a huge strain on my machine. The first thing I'm going to do next month is get one of those new Intel Ivy Bridge class CPUs and a motherboard to match, so I can get the bandwidth this card is truly capable of. (Full specs, for ego-boo purposes, will be listed in another post.)

Chysonallite wrote:I'm just gonna go back to my Atari 2600 now...

Lest you think I'm one of those GLORIOUS PC MASTER RACE people, far from it: It's only recently that I had a PC that was capable of running any 3D game, much less one at high quality settings.

I have always tinkered with PC hardware, ever since the days of the IBM PC (now that dates me!), but I always concentrated on building servers -- connectivity and fast storage was the goal, not graphics power. I haven't owned a console since the Sega Saturn, which gives you an idea of the kind of gaming I've done up to now ("not much", is the correct answer). I spent three years playing Star Wars Galaxies on a crappy laptop with an onboard Intel chip that only managed to produce this:

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That's pretty horrible, but I lived with it. Fueled mainly by envy, I built my first "gaming" PC in 2007 so that I could play.... Oblivion. Even at the time, with enough mods and enough tweaking, I was able to achieve this:

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That was awesome for a game that's half a decade old by now. But it was still more or less on par with consoles, and I would regularly go to game shops when the PlayStation 3 came out, and shook my head in awe at the sort of beauty that thing was able to churn out. I was envious as hell of console players.

Right now, the balance is tipped in favor of PCs, but you know full well that the next generation of consoles -- and games for them -- is going to blow everybody's minds.

I just entered Whiterun with ENB enabled and.... dear god.

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Minus that is a awesome screenshot. I'm gonna sound like an idiot but what is ENB whatever sorry to ask but need to know. What mods are you using my desktop is pretty good I guess. But I want a little more firm Skyrim so the mods if you will.

Minus that is a awesome screenshot. I'm gonna sound like an idiot but what is ENB whatever sorry to ask but need to know. What mods are you using my desktop is pretty good I guess. But I want a little more firm Skyrim so the mods if you will.