[Tinkerbells]

These are the PC specs for my brother's laptop. He's been having problems with a low framerate in Skyrim, so I'm posting the specs.

Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit
2nd-Gen Intel Quad-Core iy-2630QM (2.0 Ghz, 6MB L3 Cache) w/ Turbo Boost up to 2.9 GHz
1GB GDDR5 Radeon HD 6490M Graphics
6GB DDR3 System Memory
1366x768 HD BrightView LED Display

Hope that's enough to get an idea.

Chances are very good that he must specifically shut off the IGP in setup in order to get the game to actually use the real graphics card.

[mollypop]

Well, I found both the IGP and Radeon in Device Manager working and disabled IGP, but the desktop went immediately into a lower resolution and I turned it back on. Do I need to disable it in a different manner?

[Cat]

They're all different. Sometimes it's in setup (BIOS), sometimes it's in Catalyst (driver). It sounds just now as if the driver needs an update also.

[Christina Trayler]

Hey! I wanted to ask how well Skyrim would run on my computer. I'm a bit concerned since its not a dedicated gaming machine, but I won't be able to switch rigs for awhile most likely. My specs are:

Late 2009 iMac

Intel Core 2 Duo E7600 3.06GHz
4GB RAM
Windows 7 64bit
Radeon Mobility HD 4670 (256 MB)
1920x1080

[Petr Jordy Zugar]

Hey guys, I'm building a new computer for skyrim and wanted to know if this set-up would be good for medium settings on a somewhat low budget.

AMD Phenom II X4 955 3.2 GHz
8 GB RAM
Radeon HD 6670 1GB
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

[Nicole Mark]

Hey guys, I'm building a new computer for skyrim and wanted to know if this set-up would be good for medium settings on a somewhat low budget.

AMD Phenom II X4 955 3.2 GHz
8 GB RAM
Radeon HD 6670 1GB
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

That's really good for a budget PC. The processor, in particular, is great for gaming, and if you upgrade to a mid range Radeon HD 7xxx series next year it can also last you for a good while.

[Micah Judaeah]

Just stopping by to say this old computer can run Skyrim smoothly:

Gigabyte GA-MA69VM-S2
AMD Athlon? 64 X2 dual core 4000+ 2.1GHz
1GB DDR2 RAM
ATI Radeon HD 2400 series 256MB
resolution is 1024x768

shadows turned off, textures on high, all other settings on medium.
I have not tried setting a higher resolution yet (it can't go much higher on this monitor) or moving other settings to high, because I was simply too excited to be playing the game. Somebody else posted their system with low specs and said they could play, which gave me hope that I could, hence the reason for this post. The game looks pretty good to me.

[Nany Smith]

That's really good for a budget PC. The processor, in particular, is great for gaming, and if you upgrade to a mid range Radeon HD 7xxx series next year it can also last you for a good while.

Thats awesome, thanks!

[R.I.p MOmmy]

Zaethron, that looks like a laptop, which are usually not supported even if the individual components meet the requirements. Your computer has the capability of *running* the game, but it is not going to run it extremely well because of the lack of power. On top of that, you are quite likely to have heating issues playing games as stressful as Skyrim.

You'll have a playable game I expect, but I would save contemporary gaming for desktop computers.

It's not very nice to waste space in a thread like this with multi-posts though :/

[Joe Bonney]

Thanks, what about:

Processor: i5-2430M (2.4GHz/3MB Cache)
Ram: 8GB
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 6650M (2GB Dedicated)
Optical Drive: Blu-Ray & DVDRW
Screen Size: 17.3"
Resolution: somethingx900 I think.

[quinnnn]

Same issue - it's still a laptop. It should be able to run it, but you just never know how mobile drivers, power schemes and heating come into play.

[Gavin Roberts]

Cheers. Will it run better than console?

[GLOW...]

Cheers. Will it run better than console?

Depends what you mean by better. I think your experience out of the box would be better with an X360 and nice TV than a laptop like the ones you are talking about - if you get on with gamepads. The PC version has other things going for it such as mod-ability.

[Carlos Rojas]

What about graphics wise such as textures and what about FPS?

[Sunnii Bebiieh]

Is it possible to go below minimum CPU specs and still have the game run at all? I have a desktop that more than passes on the other specs but is only running @ 2 x 1.8 GHz. Half the games I play on medium - high settings supposedly don't run on my rig if you take the minimum requirements as absolute fact, though I wouldn't be surprised to find that Skyrim taxes my system heavily.

I'm willing to take my chances with sub-par gameplay until I can upgrade my processor like it desperately needs, but is the game going to refuse to install or load because of the CPU requirement? I've seen it happen before. I'd be grateful if someone could confirm if it does or doesn't.

[Stay-C]

Zaethron, that looks like a laptop, which are usually not supported even if the individual components meet the requirements. Your computer has the capability of *running* the game, but it is not going to run it extremely well because of the lack of power. On top of that, you are quite likely to have heating issues playing games as stressful as Skyrim.

You'll have a playable game I expect, but I would save contemporary gaming for desktop computers.

It's not very nice to waste space in a thread like this with multi-posts though :/

He should run it without any problems on low though, based on what I've seen some of my friends manage with equivalent and lesser laptops. And Skyrim doesn't seem to heat a system up very much either.

[Deon Knight]

What about graphics wise such as textures and what about FPS?

Very hard to compare like for like - a TV you watch from a distance away while a laptop is only inches, so objective differences in texture resolution at source don't necessarily translate into the same subjective experience to you. I think my earlier statement still applies - you would have a better experience out of the box on the X360+nice TV than a medium/low powered laptop. That also applies to FPS - the laptop could probably generate great FPS in some cases with low enough settings, but the X360 is probably going to be more consistently 'good enough'. But as I said before, the PC has other things going for it if you like to tinker.

[Juliet]

Curiously, the recommended specs are very close to my Dell XPS 15'' laptop's, but I get like 15fps on "High".

Evaluating Skyrim recommended specs:

-Windows 7/Vista/XP PC (32 or 64 bit)
* Got it

-Processor: Quad-core Intel or AMD CPU
* Got it. Mine is an i7 740QM (quad) @ 1'73GHz (2GHz on boost mode).

-4GB System RAM
* Got it.

-6GB free HDD space
* Got more than that! (lol)

-DirectX 9 compatible NVIDIA or AMD ATI video card with 1GB of RAM (Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 or higher; ATI Radeon 4890 or higher).
* Mine is NVIDIA? GeForce? GT 435M. 1GB and DirectX 11 compatible.

-DirectX compatible sound card
* Not sure about this, but I don't really care.

I've seen my Nvidia Geforce 435M listed in the "Medium" section of the graphic cards, but I don't quite understand why, as it's DirectX 11 compatible and 1GB... I've finally diabled anisotropic filter and antialias, and set to normal most of the variables in the "Advanced" section, and I'm running at 30fps (the minimum I can accept to play).

Don't get this like a crying/complaining/blablabla post. I'm loving Skyrim and I'm just a little (veeery little) disappointed that it doesn't work as I expected when I saw the recommended specs (I've played some other games like Starcraft 2 at near Ultra with no problems, and I thought I'd see all Skyrim's beauty at its best).

My question would be: can I expect a performance improvement for my machine with future patches? Or will I only see bugfixes?

And last but not the least, congratulations and thank you for another masterpiece. I stepped into Bethesda with Fallout 3, one of my favourite games ever (New Vegas was not that good in my opinion; but just because I was son fond with Fallout 3 soundtrack), then my girlfriend introduced me to Oblivion and since that I've been despaerately waiting for Skyrim. And despite the bugs and my wrong performance expectations, this game is, as I said, a total masterpiece.

[Craig Martin]

The Geforce "30" and "35" numbered graphics cards have been designed for HTPC type usage, viewing movies and other video entertainments, not for games, and contrary to Bethesda's nonsense in the meaningless system requirements, VRAM isn't part of the performance measurement specification at all.

The Low End Geforces only have 64 bit and 128 bit memory systems, so when game playing, can't shuffle more than 256 to 512 MBs of RAM anyway. Putting a full GB on them is practically a SCAM, if the PC user doesn't have some other software that runs more slowly that will use more of that RAM. A Geforce GTX 260 is a "60" card, at the lower end of the enthusiast High End graphics card range, and far better than any "35" card.

Had you intended to use that machine for games, you should have made certain that it included an actual gaming card in it.

[JeSsy ArEllano]

Had you intended to use that machine for games, you should have made certain that it included an actual gaming card in it.

I thought it was (actually I relied on some friend's opinions, who I thought they knew what they were saying). And for instance, Starcraft 2 looks awesome in this laptop (almost everything to high/ultra and I still get 30fps).

Thanks for the clarification, Gorath. I'll take it into account for future purchases

[Laura Elizabeth]

nVIDIA's 30 and 35 cards haven't been "bad" the way that their G 205, 210, 310 cards have been. They can display high quality images, but lack the raw power to qualify for High Image Quality in many games (and it's just not possible to compare various games' looks or performance, unless they share the same game engine). Although the PRACTICAL system requirements that actually mean something are much different from Bethesda's published foolishness, that doesn't mean that the game demands any of the high end cards to look good and play well enough. Medium settings are attractive, indeed, in Skyrim.

[cutiecute]

I just want to tell an interesting experience that with these specifications:

Intel Core2Duo E4600 (Overclocked to 2.75 GHz)
vGen 2GB DDR2 RAM 667MHz
nVIDIA GeForce 9800GT 512MB

I can play with these settings at 40 fps minimum, even inside towns like Whiterun or Windhelm. I put spaces in between each for readability. The Auto-Detect preset is Low, and I adjusted it manually accordingly

1280x1024

16x anisotropic filtering

Anti-aliasing off

FXAA enabled (thank God nVIDIA developed this!)

High texture quality

Medium shadow quality (huge improvement over low with negligible impact)

Low Radial Blur quality

None Decal Quality

Reflect Sky enabled

Reflect Object, Reflect Land, Reflect Tree disabled

Actor Fade, Item Fade, Object Fade, all at maximum (15)

Grass Fade 1

Specularity Fade 5

Light Fade 20

Object Detail Fade enabled

Medium Distant Object Detail



Keep in mind that while those settings are not exactly "high" (especially Object Detail, Radial Blur, Anti-Aliasing settings are quite low, and don't get me started on water reflections), the most important ones, ones that WILL be noticed no matter how ignorant / forgiving someone could be can be set to quite high with satisfying results, I'm talking about:

Textures - High = textures are the most noticeable aspect of a game. I could get it to High with just 512MB VRAM

Shadows - Medium = with this setting, shadows are no longer pixelated, noticeably anyway, and that's quite satisfying

Anti-aliasing - FXAA = Aliasing is another noticeable aspect. While MSAA supposedly gives better image quality, FXAA hardly impacts performance with very noticeable effect. Besides, the blurry feel that FXAA makes helps create a more movie-like atmosphere, which works very well when a dragon starts to soar around


Especially considering how weak my CPU is and how people could get fps problems with better specifications (SLI setups, ungodly amount of RAM, latest i7 CPUs, SSD hard drives etc etc)

I can say that Bethesda did a pretty good job here. It scales pretty well with lower hardwares and is quite GPU bound.

[lauraa]

So, lowering the settings give better framerate ? Never heard about this before...

[Vicki Blondie]

I just want to tell an interesting experience that with these specifications:

Intel Core2Duo E4600 (Overclocked to 2.75 GHz)
vGen 2GB DDR2 RAM 667MHz
nVIDIA GeForce 9800GT 512MB

I can play with these settings at 40 fps minimum, even inside towns like Whiterun or Windhelm. I put spaces in between each for readability. The Auto-Detect preset is Low, and I adjusted it manually accordingly

...

Thanks for posting this. I was already looking into OC'ing my E4300, which has mostly identical specs as your E4600. The 2MB L2 cache was giving me pause, since the fastest way to kill performance is with cache misses. Us computer science types tend to stress things like that, lol. Anyway, great to hear that this works for you!

Not surprising though, since they would probably want the same (or nearly enough) game engine to run on the consoles. One of the reasons it's hard to take official minimum system requirements seriously.

[Jynx Anthropic]

So, lowering the settings give better framerate ? Never heard about this before...

This is not about whether lowering the settings gives more framerate, this is about "which setting" and "what happens", and "under what circumstances"

The official minimum system requirements is usually "just enough to run" requirement, and is sometimes terribly misleading, due to the fact that monitor resolution is sometimes a deciding factor, and people just can't make a list for every resolution out there

For example, with Oblivion my rig would give around 30-40 fps, despite the fact that I'm a few years ahead of the game and can play CRYSIS Warhead at Enthusiast with ~50 fps. Lowering most of the settings don't give me any performance improvement (resolution, anti-aliasing, shadow quality, etc etc)

I'm posting my setup and settings to give people better insight as to what the game actually requires with various circumstances. It is most likely that Bethesda created the system requirements list while referencing rich gamers with dual GPU and latest 6-core CPU along with triple 40" monitors (5760 x 1080 resolution. Dang! I'm jealous!) and ungodly amount of RAM, which will make gamers with low budget such as me shudder in fear of not getting playable framerate

My case proves that Skyrim is not actually THAT demanding. With the right setup and the right choices, you can play with awesome framerates while still enjoying the 2011 graphics, even if your setup is not that "gamer through and through", provided that you can bear it (I've seen people with SSD hard drives, i7 CPU, and dual GPU setup complaining about getting 40 fps at cities. "Playable framerate" is subjective indeed)