Hi everyone. A friend of mine decided to upgrade his current monitor and gave me his old one - it's an HP w2207 wide-screen monitor. Works great for everything else, and I am having no issues except when playing Skyrim. For whatever reason, the gameplay is very jerky and lags. I had no problems with my old monitor, playing on the 'high' setting which Skyrim defaulted to when I first installed it. I have uninstalled and reinstalled the driver, to no avail. My graphics card is an ATI Radeon HD 4800 series (I think 4850 or 70? Not sure without opening up my computer) and I'm wondering if there are known conflicts between this graphic card and monitor?

Any help or suggestion would be most appreciated! Thanks!

Was there a change in resolution? Is your "new" monitor bidder then your old? Try lowering the game resolution and see how that goes.

Also check the monitors refresh rate.

couple things:
- what was your old monitor? (what size, and what was the native resolution?)
- what resolution were you running the game at before?
- what resolution are you running the game at now?

My old monitor was an Xplio - 19". The new monitor is a 22" widescreen. Previously, I was playing Skyrim at an Aspect Ratio of 4:3, and resolution set at 1024x768 and it worked great. With my new monitor, it's set at an Aspect Ratio of 16:10 widescreen, resolution 1680x1050. I'll try lowering the resolution and see if it improves. Thanks for the advice!

that would definitely explain the performance difference...not only a change of res, but pushing more resolution onto a bigger screen.

Yep, just tried lowering the resolution and much improved! Duh - something so simple...*cheesy, embarrassed grin*

Make sure to play in windowed mode if you're running on a lower resolution, otherwise it'll be quite blurry.

Sorry...Windowed mode?

In the launcher's options menu where you can pick resolution there's also a check box for 'windowed', which means the game will launch in a window like other apps instead of expanding out to use your entire screen. Personally I can't stand the look of window'ed mode myself but what they were implying is that since your screen can run at 1650x1050, stretching a lower resolution across the same space would look well, stretched. Vs a windowed mode which would only be 1024x768 pixels in size...but its a lame-ass window rather then the full screen.

You have the option to run 'full screen' or in its own window in the launcher.

When you have low res projected on a large screen, all the yucky edges and textures are really easy to see. If you took a great 1920x1080 image on your 22" screen, and blew it up to a 60" tv, it wouldn't look as good. So what yphan is suggesting is that if you are playing at a resolution similar to old monitor on new monitor, it will appear as a slightly less clear image. But, realize that windowed mode tends to cost more resources for most systems, so you have to test to see what res you like and what res works well.

(ninja'd by bump!)

to keep your ratio of the monitor to order.... see how well the game plays at 1280x720/800 (720 for 16:9, 800 for 16:10 ratio modes).... This will eliminate the stretching a little, at hopefully not as big a cost to performance you were experiecing running at the native resolution.

but i'm betting that the wider screen is what will provide the largest impact to performance due to more objects/details being displayed. vs the cut off experienced on 4:3 aspect.

Either way.... things are never going to look very pretty running at anything other than native...

I recently had to replace my 1920x1200 24" monitor. During the downtime, I used an old Dell ultrasharp from 6-7 years ago, much smaller resolution (which I adjusted to match native). I had to put Skyrim on hold until the new monitor arrived because of the old monitor's response time. It played so terribly! I mean it played fine, its just my computer was doing things faster than the monitor could display them. I'm just adding this in case anyone sees this thread that when shopping around for a new monitor, always gets something with a <5ms response time. I have no idea what my old Dell's was, but it was definitely the culprit.