My machine is an Alienware M17, graphics card is a laptop model, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3870 x2.

My overall game performance is reasonable, and I've been able to coax a fairly nice look out of Skyrim (with modder help, thanks modders!). My drivers are up to date and I've got a reasonable balance between performance and looks.

But whatever I try, fire effects like dragon breath, camp fires, and torches, are mostly invisible. All I get is the sound and the damage, and maybe a few embers off of a torch. I think this problem has been reported by others with the exact same card that I have.

I'm not going to have much luck upgrading a laptop. Does anyone know of a workaround for this, or am I hosed?

Anyone?

"Anyone?"

Yea, I feel you. I have the same problem too and Bethesda still hasn't offered a solution to resolve it. Not that this has priority over other issues with the game, but it's obviously a problem with some ATI cards and something that's easily fixed by downloading http://enbdev.com/index_en.html. It's unbelievable a lone guy from Russia can fix the problem with a 100kb file only a couple weeks after the game is released, but Bethesda's developers can't do it with a simple update. Thank goodness for his expertise and willingness to help us out, meanwhile Bethesda gives no specific information on what they're resolving, only sugar-coated PR releases.

I love Skyrim and certainly got more out of it than what I expected. I'm blown away how well my old iMac handles this game which goes to show Bethesda created an incredibly beautiful, yet efficient gaming engine, but I wish Bethesda would be a little more transparent in what exactly they're doing to patch the game or at least give us some sage DIY advice until an update becomes available. They created the game after all!

Running (very smoothly) on a:

2007 iMac, Core2 Duo 2.4GHz
Windows Vista (Boot Camp)
ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT
3 GB RAM

The HD 3870 X2 is a dual core GPU that needs to have a profile in Catalyst to work properly with both cores, else one must be disabled. The Beta version 12.1 driver was for the more recent Radeons, I think. When you say "most recent" drivers, that is very subjective, since it depends on the source. If you named the 11.12 set, they were the newest.