I have what you would call the "minimum requirements" to play Skyrim on PC, 2ghz dual core with 2gig RAM and an Nvidia Geforce 9500 GT 1gig. I had to set the graphics on low across the board, but the game was playable with a decent FPS. On top of that I never had any of the bug problems that others were reporting. All in all it was a good setup if lacking in the texture and detail area.

This past Xmas I received a XMS Nvidia GT 520 1 gig card for my system. I know from the Nvidia site that the 520 is not a major step-up from the 9500, but at least it is more advanced in design and software. My only problem now is that Skyrim is going into random CTD's without any regard to where I am or what I am doing. My installed mods have not changed, and the only setting changes I have made are putting textures on medium from low.

On first thought, my feeling is that the GT 520 is probably a DOWN-grade, not an upgrade. I'll get back to you.

One of the problems with a side by side comparison is that over time, different generations use different sub-units to do the same things. I don't believe that the 520 is really only "half as good" as the 9500 GT, but it certainly isn't good enough for Skyrim, that's for sure!

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=650&card2=574

Did you do anything to the drivers after switching the card?

There's some chance it might just keep working with the previous Nvidia driver since their driver packages include drivers for most cards that are still usable for current games, but when switching hardware like that it might be a very good idea to clean up any old drivers, reboot and install the latest driver for the card.

tzt - I updated the drivers as soon as I installed the new card.

First off, both cards are horrible and you actually took your system backwards as it was more a downgrade then upgrade from your previous card.

The GT 520 ranking is piss poor at best and is better suited for watching youtube videos..........

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=GeForce+GT+520

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

Well, I'm under a tight budget, so how would a GT 430 work out in comparison? I've been looking at the below Nvidia link as a reference.

http://www.geforce.com/Hardware/GPUs/geforce-gt-520/performance

I'd say first off, leave the GT stuff alone, at the very least try to get your hands on a GTX 260, you can probably find one real cheap on ebay, you won't have the DX11 stuff, but this game does not use anything special anyway, be sure your PSU is rated to use it.

On a tight budget go bare minimum 9800 GT. Shop online. On ebay they have one for 39 bucks. Am sure craigslist is another good option.

The only GTs worth looking at since the 9800 GT was a currently produced card have been "40s", like the GT 240 was, but now it's out of production. I don't think that the newest 40s are any better than the 430, though -- the 430 was designed for HTPCs, for entertainment, and for some older games. It is better than a 520, but not really by enough to be in contention. These days, look for GTS or GTX if you insist on Geforce, and pay a bit too much most of the time, although there have been some really great rebates on GTX 460s lately.

In the middle zones, AMD Radeons have all the best price points sewn up. You just get far better bang for your buck from an HD 6570 or HD 6670 than from a GT from nVIDIA, any of them.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fastest-graphics-card-radeon-geforce,3085-2.html

I found better prices on HD 6670s than on HD 5670s, at Newegg, at least.

Ok, I've found an ATI Radion HD 6670 on newegg in my price range. I've always been an Nvidia user before, so I'm not familiar with ATI. What are your thoughts. below is the link.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131440

You can reach high settings with such a card, but I have misgivings about that brand. This one here is $59 after rebate (XFX)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150542

ATI has terrible driver support. Borrow $40 and get this instead. I have it and it will run anything at high or better at 1080p. Skyrim looks awesome.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130625

Driver problems used to be a complaint about ATI. but have never been particularly problematic for AMD since the merger, and lately, nVIDIA has as many bad drivers as ATI ever had in the bad old days!

nVIDIA just hasn't got the luxury of enough time to be as thorough as in the past. They are staring a collapse of the graphics card market in the face and struggling to replace that with a Smartphone or scientific CPU market instead. Their high end remains good, and drivers for the very latest of their parts are fair, but support has gone to hell on anything as much as two years old.

All opinion and not supported by any facts. You sound like a paid nVidia basher on the Yahoo stock forums. Tegra is a succes. Fusion is a dud. The sales back that statement up.

Unofficial "Will My PC Run Skyrim" Thread #56 w/ hardware guide


http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1316509-unofficial-will-my-pc-run-skyrim-thread-56-w-hardware-guide/

It has a giant list of gfx card. Generally speaking higher up the list you can get the better. They are well ordered.
Both AMD/ATI and NVidia have their faults. I've had both and I've never had any issue with either. Get the best you can within your budget just make sure it's better than what you already have.
Driver support has good days and bad days on both sides. So I wouldn't take too much of an issue with the fandom from either side.

I'd imagine you'd be happy with the AMD Radeon 6670. Just make sure when you upgrade to their beefy cards that your powersupply is okay to handle it.
Aslong as your PSU is around 350w (or above) you should not be worried. Any lower and you might need to upgrade.
Heard alot of reports of this overclocking well. Not that it will benefit you much in skyrim. Overclocking the CPU has a bigger impact for Skyrim.

Well, it all comes down to convincing the wife to let me return the card she gave me for Xmas to buy a better card that will run Skyrim. I may not come out of this one alive.

Take her out for a nice meal and convince her to swap it for a GTX460.

If you're getting a real video card just make sure your PSU can handle it!

I use both Nvidia and ATI, GTX and HD ranges, I've never had problems with driver support from either of them, only one time did one of them falter in my opinion and that was Nvidia delaying their DX11 cards in favor of their cuda stuff, not the best move they ever made, cuda is great for cad, but cad does not have a big following like games.

That is great advice. I like my GTX 550 but wish I spent another $50 to get the external exhaust 460. The rumors about the 660 are starting to trickle in so next time I'll get it right.

The problem I have with AMD Driver support is that I'm still not convinced an AMD/ATI chipset will have driver and software updates 2, 3, 5 years from now, while Nvidia's software STILL supports their Series 6 GPUs, and they STILL provide fixes for older GPUs.

In example, the 12.1 Preview drivers everyone was raving about were intended only for 5000 and 6000 series AMD GPUs.

This is important for people that don't buy super-high-end and play high-end games right after release on the highest settings. You can easily let a video card slide for years until a game you want to play forces you to upgrade -- lack of driver and software support should NOT be what forces you to upgrade.

I also bet AMD will take their sweet time getting Windows 8 support for the future for "legacy" chipsets, while Nvidia's UDA structure mostly guarantees support for Windows 8 with the rest of the modern chipsets.

This is even worse on laptops, where OEMs have bullied AMD (or visa-versa) into not providing legacy support at all.

That said, for budget gaming machines, new AMD processors with their fancy APUs + AMD Video card in Hybrid Crossfire is sixy...for OpenGL, DirectX10, and DirectX11 (no DX9 support unfortunately!)

Justify it like this: The better the video card the cooler the games look the less likely you'll go out and get bombed at a bar with your friends and just want to stay home and play video games (getting bombed while doing that optional). Replace bar with 'sports games' or any other place where you can easily spend 50-100$ in a night.

I'm using a Radeon 5870, runs solidly at 60FPS indoors and quite decent outdoors (51 FPS with the SkyBooster at DragonsReach steps), this is on Ultra+ settings. AMD claim the card coming next year will have double the performance of their current best card, but to be honest I seriously doubt it. Its maybe a bit out of price range, they come in at just under $200, but for someone living in the UK believe me $200 for that card is good, you yanks got it good, in UK currency ￡200 would be considerably more than $200

My main problem with AMD is they seem to put less VRAM on their cards, you can get higher than 1GB but Nvidia do 2 and 4 frequently don't they? I was thinking of switching to an Nvidia with at least 2GB mem next year until I heard the news about the new Radeon, now I'm confused

I've got the highest vram/GPU cards on the market, they are rare and actually yah ATI seems to be more forward thinking with their vram allocations actually. The ones I've got a special editions, the standard is only 1.5GB.

AMD restricts their card designs so that you can't have as many non-reference designs with more memory, unlike Nvidia. The amount of memory on reference AMD cards vs reference Nvidia cards of similar performance is about the same.

As for "has double performance", well there's a bunch of ways to improve a card's performance, and none of them directly equate into increased FPS by the same percentage you increased performance on the chip or board. And a lot of these methods only work with specific software implementation, like DirectX10/11, OpenGL 4.x, etc. So we'll have to see how much faster they really are.

Just like how everyone was exited about Fermis being able to deal with 2.5 triangles where they were dealing with 1 before, and where AMD still deals with 1. But that didn't directly equate into 2.5x increase in FPS either. It's all about where the bottlenecks are.