I have an older graphics card (Radeon 3870 HD) and while my FPS is flawless on high settings with a few dialed back to medium, I'm not seeing certain effects on ANY graphical setting.

Dragon fire is the most obvious instance of this. I see the light from the fire projected onto textures, and I see things catch on fire, but the fire itself is invisible.

Other examples include the first destruction fire spell and cobwebs in dungeons.

Done the obvious things like updating drivers and trying lower settings, but even on lowest of the low I can't see them.

Is it simply a matter of having an extremely outdated graphics card? I suspected I'd need to upgrade it but the game performs brilliantly on mostly high settings, save for my particle effects issue.

Cheers.

This is a much bigger problem than you think.

Can't see most spell effects (clairvoyance for instance is completely useless).
Cobwebs are invisible.
Dragons fire breath is invisible as well, this means death.

And for the gamebreaker, a later quest involves you having to line up a beams of light from three columns...but won't be able to see the beams of light, game over.

Really hope this gets fixed.

Yeah after playing a bit more I concluded it's not just an outdated card. Some NPC woman I was fighting shot lightning at me and it showed up perfectly, and in her other hand she had a fire spell that would only show up half the time. It was really bizarre, I'd keep loading it to test it over and over and sometimes I'd see fire streaming from her hand and other times I'd just catch on fire without seeing a thing.

Lovely game, just frustrated that I can't see half the stuff

I was having the same problem, no torch flame in 1st person, no spiderwebs ever, hardly any flame effects and invisible lakes. But then I downloaded beta firmware for my GeForce gt 330m, and presto, everything works great. Try updating firmware and looking for betas

Yeah I've looked for beta drivers but the most recent stuff was a few weeks ago for ATI unfortunately. I wish my geforce card hadn't crapped out on me :\

ATI is making a CAP file for Skyrim that should hopefully be released sometime soon. Otherwise we're just going to have to wait until next week when 11.11 hits >.>

Funny how Nvidia had a beta driver out a full week before Skyrim hit while ATI just sat around.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1257882-patch-1-unofficial-bugfix/

He fixed it, lol.

Just drop the files into your Skyrim folder.

haha, wow.

Thanks for the link, works great.