Kind of like the steam discussion with pcusers, right? They bought the game with it's limitations...right?

what i don't understand is why a bunch of pc elitist bought skyrim for the 360, expecting high res texture packs LOL. the textures are as high of quality as the console will allow them, use some common sense. ram limits how big the res can be...

actually its more the CPU and GPU that limits it RAM limits how many things can be rendered on the screen. Which is why most games including Skyrim is more CPU heavy because the CPU is the only decent part that is in today's generation but even that cannot go so well because PS3's CPU is very much more powerful then the 360's but due to the PS3's architecture developers cannot get the most out of it.

Well if i brought a game that required steam and i didn't like the idea of it i would have to be a A+ moron for buying it.Take what you will out of that and the console/texture comparison

We agree! Hey, must be something wrong here

LOL I'm glad we see eye to eye.

The screen resolution doesn't have much to do with the effectiveness of a texture pack. A game displaying in 480p would benefit just as much from a hi-res pack. The reason you don't see the difference is because the guys taking comparison screenshots are using shots of distance elements where you can't see much detail in the objects anyway. The hi-res pack Bethesda released makes things look better up close; that's what high-res textures do.

Yes, there are technical limitations and they make it harder to make a business case for doing more. Sometimes the economics of developing software are depressing. See below.


They are not getting the full potential from the various consoles. Why? There isn't a good business case for spending years finding ways to optimize their code as much as possible. This has always been true; an Atari 2600 game written by a hobby programmer now can look better than anything released while it was a popular machine. Creating the most efficient software possible takes lots of programmer time and programmer time costs money. What they did with Skyrim is pretty impressive. When Oblivion and FO3 came out everyone was saying those were as good as this sort of game could look on a console. They were clearly wrong.

Oh come on, the Xbox users are getting a timed exclusivity on the first two major DLC (ie not the freebies).

Just let us have this one thing.

This is entirely wrong console players expect higher graphics fidelity even today the console however does not upgrade so your working with 2006 hardware (2005 really) and need to make your game pretty graphics do sells games they can bring in a lot of sales if the publisher/dev milks it as Bethesda did with Skyrim and the "open world" part as well but using techniques such as but not limited too small FOV and huge weapons to render less in Skyrim's case various separate cells so you cannot render too many in one area as well as short draw distances can make this possible. Now Skyrim has only a better art style then Oblivion and you can argue FO3 as well but that's due to 99% of that is just brown technical wise it is using the same power pretty much as Oblivion or FO3 did.

Now you can argue that Beth still are not getting the full potential out of both consoles PS3 is the 3rd child of TES it has issues even though Xbox does have issues as well it has more so but very few developers do utilize the PS3 for its full potential because it is more difficult then XBox to PC both using windows both using similar architectures.

So again if Bethesda COULD have put better graphics in the game they would have prior to release the engine is more then capable and can be put in because such options exist on PC version but due to the limitations both 360/PS3 they cannot without lowering the already 30fps to more 10-5fps even which at that is unplayable by anyone I personally consider 25 to be unplayable but I am used to solid 60fps on any title.

And lets not forget that PS3 and 360 are not even using 1080p they are using stretched 720p also referred to 1080i huge difference between the two.

More lag? I haven't had any.

That's because you're not on a console with a high-resolution texture pack.

http://www.boallen.com/fps-compare.html
What you see is in the middle what I see is on the bottom what a "HD" pack on the console will look if your lucky is on the top.

If your use to 60FPS as I am you can notice less easily same goes if your use to 30-25fps you can notice difference of 15 or lower. It depends on what your use too I cannot play games for a long period of time at constant 25FPS because I am not use to it. With that said whenever I play any console title that I own I do not play longer then 30 minutes at a time because I do not feel comfratable doing so due to the significant difference I can see. Where as anyone use to a console and its low FPS can enjoy hours on it and same happens when they play a game at 60fps they usually need a break after awhile as I do.

This generation of consoles is about as good as they can be aside from jailbreaking them. It is unlikely that a texture pack would NOT grind on the console's lack of a RAM capable of running med-low level graphics, along with the graphics card that (I think) is suited only to the current RAM, so it won't look better anyway unless the graphics card can process it and the RAM can pull that many more functions out the bum (draw distance, higher contrast between objects, etc)

Just buy a PC. I am waiting until I start (and then finish) my bootcamp to buy my new PC so I won't be distracted from my long-term goals in exchange for Skyrim at it's peak

No. The game looks good enough.

Unless its possible to download hardware upgrades from xbox live, I really doubt its possible. I would love to have better graphics on my xbox but after all Ive had my xbox for atleast 4 years, and its getting old.

It would be nice, but also doubtful. The main problem is that the game was build at the highest limit consoles could support. Not the highest limit that a PC could support. So when it comes to PC's there is room to improve the graphics, but on a console they are already at their limit.

Again it would be nice, but the consoles are already at their max.

Since "hardware" refers to the literal, tangible guts of your machine, I'd be really impressed if Microsoft offered a downloadable upgrade for it. They can offer firmware/driver updates. That's it.

And on the OP: as others have said, consoles have already been maxed out. PC users have just gotten upgraded to something that looks more like it would if it had been developed primarily for PC.

It's just not possible, seriously. The 360 and the PS3 both have under 500mb of RAM, and under that amount of VRAM too. My system with 4GB of RAM and 1GB of VRAM can stutter with the High Resolution Texture Pack if I'm having a bad day. Using just the HD pack pushes 1GB of VRAM. If you're on a system with 256MB or so, then you're just not going to be able to run the game at all with those textures.

As nice as it would be, from a technical point of view it's impossible. It's nothing to do with better optimisation. You cannot run a 1GB Texture Pack on a GPU with 256MB of VRAM.

Its not worth it, Bethesda already released an Hd version of skyrim on pc and I don't even notice the difference

I can certainly notice the difference with things like clothes especially. However they were seriously low res to begin with.