I discovered quite by accident that increasing the field of view also gives textures a sharper and less blurry appearance. (keep in mind the improvement is not massive)

Im guessing this is because when the FOV is larger your character is not as physically close to the textures.

Beth optimized the textures for middle distance viewing (eg for consoles players playing on HDTVs and sitting on their couch)

Try it and see if you also have (the appearance of ) sharper and cleaner textures. As far as I can see there is no performance degradation and a larger FOV is quite welcome.

a fov of 75 or 90 works quite well.

What I did. (playing on ultra settings and with antroscopic filtering forced to 16 in nvidia control panel.)

1. added to SkyrimPrefs.ini in mygames folder (not steam folder)

(add the below under the [Display] heading)

fDefaultWorldFOV=XX
fDefault1stPersonFOV=XX.XXXX

eg for fov of 75 change to
fDefaultWorldFOV=75
fDefault1stPersonFOV=75.0000

enjoy

Sitting 2-3 feet from a 24" monitor is little different then sitting 5-6 feet from a ~47" TV.(Range varies depending on TV and monitor size) This statement is invalid.

I play with FOV 85 for my widescreen monitor, the default 70 just doesn't cut it. And yeah, since there's more on the screen everything will be slightly smaller/further away, so the low resolution of the textures is less obvious.

thanks for your contribution and obviously superior knowledge

I did say sitting on a couch. My couch and most people i know have their couch atleast 8-10 feet away from it but whatever.....

Ahem

Thanks for the post though - the default FOV in first person feels very claustrophobic as it is anyway.

ah yeah whoops... SkyrimPrefs.ini !

thanks

The default FOV is 65 in Skyrim and 75 in Oblivion.

So maybe I'll use 75 again.

If you must attempt to correct people you should endeavour to make sure that you aren't in fact flatly incorrect yourself. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blZUao2jTGA

It is correct that your statement is invalid, yes.

I use 80, but any higher and my character's hands annoy me in first person. I use a bound sword and a summon spell, so I have a bright purple flaming sword in one hand, and a ball of swirling purple in the other. The higher you set the fov, the closer to the center of the screen your hands seem to move. At a fov of 90 the hands seemed to be in the middle of the screen and obscured my view. Pretty annoying for bound weapons since sheathing them forces you to re-summon when you need them again.

Hopefully someone can create a mod to widen the gap between the character's hands for higher fov figures. It makes my head hurt after a while

There's also the question of pixel density. It's much harder to see the individual pixels on a TV even if the "proportional size" is the same.