I originally had that problem. The clouds, water spouts in the thermal region, as well as the water surfaces, and even some webs and magical effects didn't render.

It was because my video card driver was out of date ... and that was out of date because my HP Advisor (which updated the drivers) was out of date and needed replacing. So I updated the HP thing and it in turn downloaded all the latest drivers for me.

After that Skyrim was beautiful!

I have the latest ATI Driver installed (11.12.) Im curios if somebody else have similiar problem?

try going to your documents\my games\skyrim and open the skyrimprefs.ini

locate the section [MAIN]

see if there is a fskycellreffadedistance= there

it'll likely say 150000..... change it to 300000

otherwise if it's not there just add

fSkyCellRefFadeDistance=300000.0000

and save... open the game.. see if it's there now.

Changed the file like you said but it didnt help either.
your help is appreciated, thanks

Use ENB, that should solve your problem.

You can find it on skyrim nexus.

Hope that helps you.

Don't normally suggest this but if you can I would replace that 3870. The 2XXX and 3XXX were a low point for ATI and anything you can buy now would be an improvement.

Your processor is fine (pretty good actually) e8400 isn't much different to a dual core i5.

an e8400 is totally different compared to an i5..

an i5 is a quad core to begin with....

the frequencies aren't entirely different but an i5 will run circles around the e8400

Now the e8400 runs skyrim VERY well.... but i know for a fact that the i5 low end cpu would improve it....

Still a 2xxx/3xxx does very well if they are the midrange~>highend video .... such as the 2600XT or 3870.... the issue is that they at the time, didn't come with more than 512mb of vram..

this game vanilla mode is HEAVILY dependant on vram... and anything below 1gb start stretching it's capabilities.

There are i5 dual cores. And no there isn't that big a difference between penryn core2s (like the e8400) and i5. The latter overclocks much better, true.

Also I beg to differ on the graphic cards. The 3xxx were an improvment on the 2xxx but only because the latter was very poor (thanks to ati not having the inside line on dx10). Neither outperformed the 8800 series.

I'm not dissing amd, the 4xxx were a great return to form. I was just saying that for ~$100 you'd have to look hard to find anything that can't beat the 3870 today. And that if the graphic card is the issue there's really nothing to lose by upgrading.

i'm aware of there being i5 dual core.... however they are not at all common let alone frequently seen in desktop machines... not unless you go out of your way to ensure you get a dual core i5.... but why?

The 2xxx series was mostly a flop.. simply due to the way the 2900xtx performed .. being the flag ship of the entire series... it did horribly resulting in it's underlings being tossed aside.... even though a 2600xtx would quite often out perform the top tier models from the previous generation.. x1900xtx < HD2600pro/xt.

the 3870 512mb cards were a direct and very efficient card compared to that of the 8xxx and 9xxx cards... actually the 3200 series intergrated parts today still perform admireably considering.

The HD4xxx wasn't ALL that much of a world changer aside from just taking the great working solution that was the HD3xxx and make some necessary improvements to it. a 4830 vs example is around/about the same performance as a 3870......... well in line with each micro generational change we've seen.. such as the move from the hd5xxx to the 6xxx series.... actually aside from a few micro changes to the hd7xxx... it's not entirely a brand new chip either.. guess we'll wait for amd to bring us the new flavor come HD8xxx if they decide to do it.

But yes... a $100 bucks may be able to squeeze a bit more gpu juice than the 3870 has.. but you better ensure that it has GDRR5.... otherwise it's not going to do well.