hey guys,
last time i was playing skyrim i noticed how horrible some places looked from a distance i.e. whiterun and solitude marshes.

i would be looking around the vast detailed forests and mountains of skyrim then BAM flat, plain, basic cardboard buildings, jagged edges, no detail whatsoever
this is basically what solitude marshes looked like from a distance:
[img]http://www.blogcdn.com/www.joystiq.com/media/2011/11/alloftamriel.jpg[/img]
the boats at the harbor also looked tacky too.

maybe it was because i was on ps3 that it was less detailed?

However i was watching pc/console side by side comparisons of areas around skyrim and i saw whiterun looked just as bad as the console version looking at whiterun from a distance.

im now moving onto the pc version of skyrim in december so i was wandering if there is a way to improve the FoV quality of places like whiterun and the marshes? are there any mods that improve the texture detail of these places from a distance? can anyone provide some good in game screenshots of whiterun and the marshes from a distance too?

thanks

LOD distance looks like crap on all platforms, but a powerful enough PC with card/s possessing a gig of memory can overcome some of it editing the ini, or mods.

To get rid of the blotchy textures in the distance you need to increase the number of cells loaded, which is known to be unstable. But on PC, ultra settings renders trees reeeeeally far away so it makes the scene much less bland and helps hide the lack of detail.

well the system i have is:
8gb RAM
Nvidia GTX 660ti
intel core i5 2500k
64gb SSD
1tb HDD

could my baby be able to handle these "unstable" details?

anyone?

Experiment. See what happens. Try NMM with an LOD mod. Watch out for UGridsToLoad mods. UGridsToLoad is not native to skyrim's ini.

I'm pretty certain they make these games with the consoles in mind first and then buff it up for PC. Problem with that is that these consoles are getting towards the end of their cycles, so I'm sure they're bumping up against the technological restrains, especially of the 360. The PS3's problem is the complexity of the hardware structure that makes it tough to take advantage of its superior power.

i understood about 30% of what you said there :/
sorry, can you say it in dumb language for me? lol!

UGridsToLoad determines how many cells Skyrim loads at one time. You know when u sometimes get those little micro studders? Thats Skyrim loading new cells. When Skyrim loads more then one cell it makes it a bit unstable and therefore I recommend keeping it at 7 and below (5 being default value). This improves the look of Skyrims long distance views by fully loading them into sight, but it drops FPS alot. Also you have to add the value yourself to the Skyrim.ini

NMM Stand for (Nexus Mod Manager) Go to the Nexus forum to learn more. LOD stands for (Load On Demand) UGridsToLoad isn't native to skyrim ini files. Oblivion had it, so some modders write it in as a perameter, and its use is potentually unstable.