I thought update 1.3 was supposed to fix the dragons not rendering correctly, i am getting (for the first time) dragons that have N64 Turok graphics all of a sudden, is this going to be addressed further in the next patch, anyone know?

I imagine that it's just your system. My graphics look absolutely sweet. I haven't had any issues with the texture rendering, and I've certainly never even read a complaint on here hwere it was that bad.

Since the game uses so much space caching, how much room do you have on your HDD? A game like this, that uses cache the way it does, if you don't have plenty of room for it to cache the necessary info, then you'll start to see cut backs in performance in Graphics rendereing, screen tearing, FPS drops, etc.

Just trying to narrow down the possibilities.

So Uriel your saying that if you have a 4 gig hd, then getting a bigger one will make the game run smoother?

in most cases it does help, some do still get issues even with a bigger hard drive

also as far as low res dragons it has been mentioned but very few have experienced it

I have noticed an issue with the dragons degrading in detail, but this only seems to happen in certain parts of the map, for example, where there are a lot of trees in the local area. When I move away from that particular part of the map, the dragon returns to high detail. Thus, I assume that the game engine is struggling with the amount of free RAM at that particular time, and so reduces the level of detail on certain objects, like dragons. Note that if the game runs out of memory, it can't simply reduce the amount of memory on 'part' of an object. It must scale down the detail on the entire object. There are usually three levels of detail for each object.

mmm_buddah23, where did you see the dragon reducing in detail?

Your problem is that you have the 4gb Xbox Slim, right?

If so, then your problem is that you don't have enough room. That's not even an actual HDD, it's 4gb of flash memory. That's not enough free space to power a game as large as Skyrim. It's not even enough free space to play Halo: Reach or CoD:Black Ops on Live. It'll work fine for offline play, but should you take them online, the lag will be interminable.

If you are having any problems with lag in Skyrim, or with texture resolution being N64 quality and you are playing on the 360 s 4gb system, then you just don't have enough free space in the memory to really run this game, so the processors are having to scale back on just about everything so that it will even possibly run.

While the Slim line of 360's comes pacjed with modern, up-to-date hardware and software, the two models differ very much in performance.

I run an Xbox 360 Slim 250gb HDD, and Skyrim hasn't given me any problems at all, at any time, ever. Even with 4+ games, DLC, music CD's, and special release videos from several game companies (Bungie, Red vs. Blue, etc.), my copy of Skyrim has about 190gb to use as available cache. The game uses nowhere near that much space, but it can take up auite a bit of it I'd imagine. Even when 1.2 was out, I had zero problems with Skyrim on either of my two Xbox's (my wife plays on an Xbox 360 Elite 120gb HDD, currently 77 gb free space on the HDD).

If the textures are as poor as OP says, then I do honestly believe that it's because the 4gb's of flash memory just aren't enough to handle a game as large as Halo: Reach, and it really can't touch Skyrim. OP needs to pop for an actual HDD... that'll probably solve most of his problems.

It's actually more likely to do with how new the HD is, rather than the size. The HD currently attached to my Arcade came with my launch Xbox, and it runs slower than the newer HD this is on my Elite.

Every Xbox HD has about 4 gigs reserved for cache use I believe. It doesn't matter if it's 20gb or 120gb, nor does it matter how much stuff you have saved on the HD.

Actually, it does matter. Think about it. Even if its true that it only has 4gb for caching, if you have the 4gb of flash memory, then after you take into account the core programming for the Xbox itself you will have about half of that. So 2gb may be just fine for caching Skyrim on the lowest settings that the Xbox can go, but let's hope that you haven't played any other games. The cache that they'd use to support playing those other games and to support those other games' save files will bring you down to just under a gig.

As I said in my earlier post: If the 4gb Xbox Slim doesn't have a HDD, and at it's size it doesn't have enough power to even take an FPS into online play. It'll run Reach or CoD just fine in offline play, but FPS's are significantly smaller games than Skyrim. The 4gigs of flash memory just aren't enough to let it keep up with a 250gb HDD.

It's simple physics.

Adding to this, to give everyone some idea of how much cache space Skyrim uses, here is a quote from a player who was having problems with subtitles not working properly. He contacted the Bethesda support team and here is what they said.

Source: http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1340184-sound-issues/page__p__20191338__hl__10gb%20flash%20past__fromsearch__1#entry20191338

This gives a clue to how much space Skyrim uses within the game cache...

And thus, going by this word from the "horses mouth" so-to-speak, a 4gb flash memory system isn't really even coming close to having the type of space to correctly process the info it has to crunch from Skyrim.

The Xbox itself has hardware that can easily process this info, but it needs the space in order to keep the necessary files in its internal queues. Thus as we are finding with the 360 Slim 4gb models, while they may be great to run Kinect and a bunch of smaller titles, they simply don't have the necessary space to run a game as large as Skyrim.

As I've said earlier, were the OP to go and even get a 120gb HDD and plug it into the back of his Xbox, he'd notice an immediate clean up of the textures, resolutions, and overall gameplay in his game. I really do believe that this is the solution he needs. May not be what he likes or is even looking for, but it is the solution that best fits the problem he is describing.

I've had this happen on my 250GB 360. What you are seeing a lower LOD dragon. This isn't a memory issue. This is the wrong mesh being selected for display.

Thanks for the help, I'll go get a 250 HDD friday.

99.99 (plus tax of course) isn't bad for a 250gb hard drive i remember the 60gig drive costing that lol, I didn't think i'd have a use for one, being i never install to the HD, but after playing on the unit for a year, and buying a couple downloadable games, avatar clothes, Its arleady down to 163mb free space, and im the only one who uses this console. the saves for the various games will eat up that 4gb rather quickly, moreso then the games themselves as cache, I just use the little 4gb area as a backup area to keep from overwriting saves.

I think the 250gb drive for the 360 is a worthwhile investment for your gaming enjoyment, not only for Skyrim, but for other large based games as well.

Flash memory is generally slow, especially to write. Sorry, I ended up in a 360 thread apparently. But there's that.

yep it is alot slower lol, my current character i've been saving to a MS flash drive, even though its the one made for the xbox, its still slllllooooowwwww... lol. thankfully only for saves.