After playing the game and looking at the loading screens constantly, I think the loading screens have better graphics than the in-game engine. Do you agree?
They seem... higher in detail somehow.

Here is a collection of all the known loading screens of skyrim for your viewing comparison:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lTzRvmMnmA&list=PLlka4OnncI_g_5Kj7wlqY2sClXx_u1zH2&feature=plpp_play_all

Maybe they just look better because they are surrounded by a black background

Seriously? Did you compare by going into a dark dungeon and the loading screen videos?
I think they are at least 2 times in detail in the textures.

THe loading screens are also static compared to the actual gameplay

Yes. They are static, but maybe because they are static, that they can put more graphical detail. Has anyone compared loading screen objects and in-game item rotation detail? I still think the loading screen are higher in texture.

Yep, they're nice. It often makes me think, "I'm betting Bethesda can make some serious coin if these were available for purchase." I'd buy the Khajiit in the leather armor statue without hesitation.

yup if they sold statues like that with all the details i would buy them in a heart beat.

Of course the Splash screens are more detailed, they are static 2D images. Each element does not have to be rendered and shadowed frame by frame in the game. They can put more detail in a static 2D image than an image that has to be animated and rendered for 3D.

It has been this way since Morrowind. Heck, I did not know Ogrims had pierced nipbles until I saw them on a loading screen in Morrowind as they barely rendered in the game.

MEEEEC, wrong. They're 3D models. In fact, you can rotate them a bit if you play with your mouse while the game is loading.

And anyways, they're listed in the CK as statics. They make http://static.skyrim.nexusmods.com/images/229639-1340744336.jpg for house mods

It has been this way since long before Morrowind. Static 2D images have been easier to render in detail than 3D models ever since the advent of 3D models! For the Skyrim loading screens, Bethesda would have been able to take their game engine, crank all its detail settings to the max (far more detailed than any of the release game's settings), and spend as much time as necessary to achieve the perfect image. In a free-roaming RPG like Skyrim, the game engine has to create each frame of video data on the fly, since there is no way for that game engine to predict where your player-following camera is going to be located, what direction it will be facing, etc. It has to be able to render the correct perspective/lighting/shading and textural detail of every 3D object in the camera's field of view, according to the location and direction of the camera, and it has to be able to recalculate and refresh this image at incredibly short intervals. Up to several hundred frames per second if you consider a high end system hooked to a 240hertz HDTV... Were you to configure the game engine to render everything at the loading screen quality, you would rapidly find that NONE of our gaming rigs would be up to the task of managing the astronomical processing loads... Hence, the need to reduce the overall quality of the in-game rendering to somethingthat most of our computer can handle...

What in the name of Sithis are you two talking about?

Those are not 2D images made from pre-rendered 3D models, they are actual 3D models with their own meshes and textures, rendered in a bounded box. Didn't you ever notice that you can rotate them in real time?

http://imageshack.us/a/img253/5798/skyrimloadscreenmalered.jpg

My loading screens are never around long enough for me to poke around in them or try to rotate anything

However they are not animated or shadowed the same way as if they were in the game. They are not 3D in the sense that they can walk behind something or in front of something. I did not know they could be rotated but that does not change the fact that they are not 3D Rendered in the game. Since they are pre-rendered and not generated on the fly (with regards to angle of view and shadowing) is why they can have more detail.



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Did you actually click on the link above? It's the NIF of one the loading screens models, you can see it for yourself in the CK. It's not pre-rendered, it's more detailed because it's rendered with a different shaders pack. A pre-rendered scene would require, at the very minimum, a BIK video file to be loaded during the transitions between cells, and there are none in the game folder. There are no pre-rendered models in the game other than the startup Beth logo.