There has now been a continuing "Big RAM Scam" that ATI's partners started back in 2006 with 512 MB versions of the Radeon X1600 Pro, when that card's 128 bit memory system and slow RAM, slow core speed, meant that all any game would ever see was 256 MBs. We now have Geforce G 210s, which are terrible POS's compared to an X1600, with a GB of RAM, and they have only 64 bit memory system.

It's a marketing scam, pure and simple, but even Bethesda's anti-tech anti-hardware people fell for it, as witness the foolishness in the minimum requirements for Skyrim.

It's all because people want bigger numbers on their hardware, just like how people were fooled way back with the Pentium 4 and it's "amazing" 3.0GHz.

In reality about 1GB of VRAM is currently all you need with modern games unless you add in HD Texture mods or Eyefinity/Surround. And if your monitor resolution is lower than 1920x1080 you can easily get away with 512MB (in fact, you can get away with it at 1920x1080). The reason I recommend 2GB is because I feel games will get Texture size bumps in the future, and/or monitor resolution bumps. And with Skyrim, HD Texture mods make the game look so damn amazing.

Just like how Crossfire / SLI don't really need more than an 8x PCI-Express 2.0 lane unless you're doing Eyefinity / Surround (and even then, only if your combined resolution is greater than 5760x1200).

Completely agreed, to note with all the various mods to date that I've thrown in there I'm usually hovering around 2.5GB of vram usage and while yah I'm a little reckless at this point on tossing anything I feel like into the textures folder I bought these 3gb guys specifically because I knew this game plus this resolution would run into vram walls long before anything else.

I used to have this, I upgraded to 4gb ram and a geforce GTX560 which is supposed to be a good card. With my old card I got CTDs every few minutes and the game was unplayable in certain areas, regardless of what settings I played on. Now I still get CTDs but much more rarely, and can play on high/ultra. Can't say if it was the ram or video card that did it though.

Anyway this constant CTD problem is clearly pretty random, and upgrading your hardware is no guarantee to fix it. It's just one thing among many that can influence it. There are people with much more impressive machines that still have the same problem. Flame Beth until they fix it, it's all you can do.

The CTDs are random enough I don't really see video drivers or specific hardware having anything to do with them. Unless the game's calling D3D functions with invalid arguments that cause undefined OS/GPU/phase-of-Secunda-specific behavior.

The game's almost perfectly stable and runs smooth enough on my GTX 560 Ti, but it still drops to the desktop with no error message every few hours. Would be nice if the game had at least some sort of error handling, even the Microsoft stock one, so we could see what's happening. Given the complete lack of error dialogs I guess the entire engine's wrapped in a crash/exception handler that does nothing except exit to the desktop, leaving the cause of the CTD a mystery.

Skyrim runs fine in Full HD with my GeForce GTX 550 TI 1 GB. That Card is cheap and by far not the fastest, but enough to play Skyrim with high settings.

Full HD is 1920x1080, that's your resolution?

Yes, that`s the native Resolution of my 24" Monitor, and the only Resolution i use for every Game.

Well I for one am glad that I didn't rush out to replace my couple year old ATI HD 3870 card w/512 RAM in it so I could play Skyrim. I'm playing with settings on high with AA and AF settings on 4x in the game play options. Ingame I'm getting around 25 FPS inside and 25 to 30 outside. Occasional 20 to 22 both inside and outside depending on where I am. I'm using the latest drivers 11.11 or something. Monitor settings at 1680x1050. I did look at the Nvidia Tweak guild and used some of its suggestions for manually tweaking the settings.

I'm expecting to have to upgrade after the CK comes out and there's more and better texture packs. Have been watching the HD 6670 cards for a decent price.

System Specs:
AMD Quad Core 955 - Stock
ATI HD 3870 gfx
4 gigs RAM
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit
Viewsonic flat panel @ 1680x1050

I'm having a similiar issue, I had a Radeon 3650 and it ran Skyrim fine on low settings, but I just got a Radeon 4650 and after installing, Skyrim suggests high graphics setting but the game crashes within 5-10 seconds of loading now. The one time it crashed to the desktop there was a message on the system tray that the display driver had stopped responding but recovered. I've uninstalled the old drivers, installed the new ones and updated to make sure they were current and tried lowering the graphics to medium with the same result.

A used 4650 perhaps? The problem does clearly exist between the driver and the video hardware though for sure.

A Radeon HD 4650 was comparatively weak sauce when brand new compared to either the HD 3650 (not really that much better) or the HD 4670, compared to which, I'd kinda been thinking it was practically an entry level card ( I was exaggerating the difference in my mind ), but now, three years after its release, that's all it does amount to any more, and you'll need your own thread to discuss this, since AFAIK, this one is still an active thread belonging to the original author.

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=580&card2=554

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=580&card2=579