Hey everyone,

I bought Skyrim today, and everything is going great, having a great time, except for a few bugs I can't seem to fix.

The first one is that my game seems to lack fire and ice effects, for example, I can't see the fire trail when I use my fire spell (I can see the lightning trail, tough) I can't see dragons throwing fire or ice at me (I can only hear it), and for example, in the Riverwoord Trader, the fireplace is lit, I can see the smoke trail, but there's no fire and no light coming from it. This happens pretty much around all of Skyrim.

But here's the strange thing, my brother, playing the same game, through the same Steam account, in the same computer (only diffrence is he logs in through his own Windows account), doesn't have any of these problems.

The second one is that sometimes the zone I'm in gets shadows all over the place, like if an eclipse was happening, and there's weird lines everywhere in the ground... This happens mainly during the daytime, during the night it almost never happens. Sorry, I can't really explain it more in detail, English isn't my native language. I can't really understand if it's a shadow problem or a texture problem. This problem, however, is also shared by my brother.

I already did a quick search and the only solution people seemed to have was updating my drivers, but they are all up to date...

If anyone could help, I would be much apprecited.

You were warned that the results would not be at all satisfactory. With the very poor quality hardware, it's a lot better than you should have expected. But you weren't satisfied with anyone's answers.

The game requires a minimum of:
" * Direct X 9 compliant video card with 512 MB of RAM (and
sufficient performance to actually put that VRAM to use)"

An HD 3470 is incapable of putting any more than 128 MBs of RAM into effective use.

Here's the oldest Radeon able to meet the minimum, compared to the tinker toy that an HD 3470 amounts to:

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=556&card2=546

What's your problem? I'll assume you're not that good at understanding what you read, considering there's various accounts of people with these same problems that managed to fix them, regardless of their hardware, except they don't clearly specified how they did it, and therefore, that's why I'm asking for help here.

I bet you didn't even read it at all, you just rushed to negatively comment. If you had read what I wrote, you'd know the first problem only happens when I play through my Windows account, because my brother, like I said, on the same computer, same Steam account doesn't have those problems. Therefore don't come blame my graphics card, because it clearly isn't it's fault, if it was, my brother would also have this problem.

You always said my laptop wouldn't run Skyrim, but well, I ignored you and with just a few performance mods I'm running it at medium settings at 30+ FPS, which for me is great considering my other option would be to buy it for Xbox 360, but I'm playing it with Xbox 360 graphics and mod support. You said it wouldn't run, and it does run. Since you look like such a PC hardcoe guy, I'm guessing that for you, satisfactory results would be to play it at high settings at 60 FPS, or something like that. The way my laptop is running Skyrim right now, for me, is more than satisfactory. I'm sorry if for some reason you felt insulted or whatever, but if you're not going to try to help me, please don't reply anymore.


Yes, I'm sure the missing fire and ice effects are being caused because my GPU only has 256mb instead of 512mb, and can't put more than 128mb to use. But you know, when my brother is playing, my GPU suddenly decides it has that power hidden somewhere and so it shows the effects when he plays. Well, maybe tomorrow my GPU will be in a good mood and I'll be able to see the effects.