So I bought Skyrim, which is absolutely amazingly gorgeous, and have played for a few hours now. However, a little while ago, I noticed that in some video reviews the reviewer says '...mountains shrouded in mist...' or someting similar. A friend of mine has bought the game for his PS3, and when I asked he said that he does get the awesome mountain fog. I have tried setting the game to Ultra settings to see if the problem lies there, but I haven't noticed any changes here. I don't see any option to set the game to use Directx 10, so it can't be that (I think). I have a tweaked .ini file, but I tried restoring the original .ini along with the Ultra Graphics settings. I can't really think of anything else to try, so here I am.

Do note that this is not a game breaking problem, but it is a problem that reduces the sort of cold, nordic ambience the game is supposed to give.

My specs are as follow:

OS : Windows 7 Professional 32-bit
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 x2 dual core 6000+ 3.11 GHz
GPU: ATI (AMD) Radeon HD 2900 Pro
VRAM: 512 Mb
RAM: 4 Gb (3.50 available since 32-bit OS)

Aside from this (hopefully) minor issue, Skyrim is incredible and it's probably the best game I have ever played. Keep it up Bethesda!

This is just a guess, but I take the fog is a dynamic event not occuring too often perhaps.
*shrug*

Or maybe the fog is result of not having view distance maxed up. I get it often, even though I play on ultra.

It could also be due to the fact, that they do not properly support old graphic cards yet and yours is pretty ... stone age.
There are cards out there for just a few more bucks than skyrim did cost ya with a +200% performance gain compared
to yours.

I have considered those possibilities, but I haven't seen the mountain fog in any weather type or at any moment at all. Unless it's a really rare event, I think it's got something to do with my computer or the game settings, and I don't think that such a small, specific effect could require a better video card than mine, which came out in 2007. I can play pretty much any game on medium or high settings anyway. Also, when playing on Ultra settings the view distance should be automatically maxed out, so that shouldn't be a problem, right?

To show what exactly I mean, in case anyone reading this thread doesn't get what I'm missing, I found this mod on the Skyrim Nexus which has a screenshot posted, in which you can clearly see fog on the mountains:

(second -vanilla- screenshot shows it better): http://skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=131#content

I'm wondering if people don't really read those forums before posting? This question exists in one form or another almost on every page. I've pasted the fix multiple times.

http://enbdev.com/download_en.htm Download the Skyrim patch. Fixes missing effects.

Hopefully someone reads my reply this time because this is a really simple fix that makes the game look much, much better for those affected.

Thanks, I'll try that now. As for reading the forums, I have actually searched the internet and this forum for hours to see if anybody has a similar problem, but I couldn't find anything, I guess I must have missed almost every page then.

I'll post the results of this fix in a few minutes.

It's definitely a GFX card issue rather than a game issue, from what i can see from your PC specs.

The Radeon HD 2900 "PRO" is an age old GFX card. Age Old in terms of being 50+-something cards between its release, up until the newest Radeon cards on the current market.

Your GFX card lacks the power, simple as that.

That windows version, as you said, only handles 3.5gb of RAM at max, and then you need to take into consideration the lack of RAM on your GFX card, as well as a portion of the RAM being preserved for the system itself.

The lower your RAM, the less effects will be shown ingame, even if you try to run it at max settings. You could even be lucky and suffer no lag (doubtfully you have some lag at max regardless with your specs), but still there would be less effects visible to you.

That was my theory as well at first. Until I found the patch that fixed the problem for me. Now the game runs great on my 256 mb motherboard integrated ati card. With all the effects.

Thanks for the reply, but the fact that Mongbat's ENBseries patch has fixed the issue for me disproves this explanation. This thread may be locked as far as I am concerned, or other people could report similar problems here. At least I'm happy now

I'm glad it worked.

Missing effects? What effects? What does it actually fix? Best would be to have a lovely comparison screen but I guess that's too much to ask for

Personally, I was having issues with the game. Opened up Windows Taskhandler->Performance Profiler and left it running in the background while trying to play skyrim. After that session I saw that Skyrim was only using about 25% of my CPU capabilities and my memory was Hard Faulting like crazy. Anyhow, I figured it was Virtual Memory problem started searching around the Internet and found one (laa_2_0_4.zip) off of a forum, made TESV large memory address aware and started up another session. WOW! what a difference that made, I was seeing Mists, Smoke trails, Heats Vapors, shifting shadows (annoying personally but apparrently by design and due to game clock) as well as a lot more stability overall. However, I am running a 64bit OS so making Skyrim large memory address aware for me is easy shmeezy (no reboot or anything) and the app can switch it back just as easy. 32bit OS's apparently have to set a /3gb boot flag and reboot or something.

Something you may want to look into, didn't think the game wouldn't be large memory address aware even for 32bit OS's because quite simply it needs more memory than 4g (base + video). Anyhow, good luck and the game is incredibly scenic...once it actually starts working.