I don't really understand what they are waiting for. It isn't like they are sitting there this AM putting the last lines of code into the last subroutine. It's obviously already been tested, approved, and ready to go.

I doubt they are sitting there looking at the complier progress bar thinking "hurry up, we told them it would be released today!"

or-

Pete: pops head into office "John, did you finish shading the saddle on the horse armor? The forums are getting restless and we told them it would be out today"
John: "Hold on Pete, I can't get the right shade of brown. I think I need to go a shade warmer. We'll have to delay another couple hours"

Skyrim barely run on medium settings at 720p resolution on consoles, how do you expect it to perform with high resolution textures? You're not playing a game that keep you on rails and has to keep in memory only a handfull of data concerning the stage or chapter you're playing, you're playing a game where the developers had to make cuts in quality to be able to give you a world where you can go anywere with almost no loadings. For that to happen the game has to keep a crapload of information in memory to mantain the flow of the game stable.

Higher res textures means higher memory requirements on a console that have a grand total of 512MB of RAM, shared between CPU and GPU or, on PS3's case, a fixed amount of 256MB for CPU and 256MB for GPU.

over 3 gigs worth of textures

Rats, doesn't look like I'll be able to use the texture pack according to the page. Windows XP user with only 2 MB system ram. Was assuming video card would be the only determining factor but guess I was wrong.

Have to check out my system specs at home (new laptop and all). I hope to be able to take advantage of this.

They are proper mods with esps, so you can switch them on and off if they dont run too well on your system.
Beth.

IDK,that game is so awful I cant belive you even mentioned this.

With 8GB RAM and 1.5GB VRAM I think my PC can run that beast well enough

Wow, you'd have a hard time running Windows 3.1 on 2MB of RAM (Yes, obviously you meant 2GB, but couldn't resit ).

Frankly, i'm not sure if my system can run it with reasonable framerates despite meeting the requirements, since my video card is only a GTS 450 (S = cheap ). If not, it's back to textures mods for me

Photorealism....why? Isn't Skyrim more stylized?

Thanks, Karnaon, for your explanation of DX. I don't think I can upgrade my existing computer to a much better card, but I do plan on buying a new computer in a couple of years. Like I said, Skyrim runs nicely on what I've got. I figure in a few years, $1200 or so will buy a much more powerful computer than it will today.

Space Core and DovahCore helmet.