7 ms·

Not much more to say than this: http://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1321675-how-can-skyrim-be-so-unoptimized-modders-do-better-job-than-bethesda/pageviewfindpo

Not much more to say than this: http://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1321675-how-can-skyrim-be-so-unoptimized-modders-do-better-job-than-bethesda/page__view__findpost__p__19868762 http://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1321675-how-can-skyrim-be-s... Bethesda are releasing patches, but right now they're fixing bugs rather than optimising performance and I'm presuming that it's a slow process because they need to test on all platforms before releasing patches.

lloeki 15y ago
Indeed Skyrim is butter smooth at 1080p on my 360, even in Markarth and Whiterun. Maybe it's lacking a few bells and whistles compared to a PC powerhouse (whose GPU alone would cost more than my console) but I don't care. Given the performance of Oblivion and Fallout 3 (which was okay-ish) for an inconsistent visual quality (see checkerboard patterns in the hills) I would never have expected Skyrim to achieve such a level. Secondly, the interface on the PC has been criticized, but on the 360 it's just fine. I bet on a PC it's a mere remap from buttons to keys and it just begs for a controller instead of keyboard/mouse. I have no PC to compare with and honestly care less, but from what I hear it shows where (some) priorities lie.
- Havoc 15y ago
  >Skyrim is butter smooth at 1080p on my 360 Its rendered internally at 1280x720 and then up-scaled (Pretty much all xbox/ps3 games do this). Which is over course a legitimate approach & looks good. In contrast on a PC, it is actually rendered at 1080p without upscaling & so the PC ends up rendering more than twice as many pixels even though both are set to 1080p in the options. So direct PC-Console performance comparisons are a bit tricky.
  - alimbada 15y ago
    I run it at 1440x900 on a Core2Quad (Q6600), 8GB RAM and an AMD HD4850 GPU. For the most part it's pretty smooth at high settings with FXAA turned on, but there are times when there's a bit of stutter or freezing especially when I quicksave (something you need to do often since Skyrim is so crash-prone). The reason I agree that Bethesda are lazy (probably more accurate to say apathetic) with fixing the PC version is that they've been doing this for years with previous Elder Scrolls games and Fallout 3 where they've just allowed the "safety net" of the modding community to do their work for them. Of course, that's only possible because of the modding tools they provide, which apparently are great since they get the job done. But, I find that sort of attitude rather insulting as a PC player. Yes, consoles have gone mainstream and are more popular than PC gaming probably by orders of magnitude, but that doesn't mean that PC gaming has declined and that the needs of PC gamers shouldn't be taken seriously.
  - gte910h 15y ago
    Where do you have the technical details on that? I have a considerably larger monitor and have been going past that, but would love to know more about detailed specs like this to better tune the game
    - zokier 15y ago
      DigitalFoundry does some technical comparisons of console releases, eg Skyrim triple-platform Face-off: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-face-off-skyrim http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-face-off-sk...
    - Havoc 15y ago
      Somewhere in the xbox vs ps3 religious wars it was discovered that you can deduce the internal rendering resolution via a technique called "pixel-counting". This involves very bored people looking at the individual pixels with a magnifying glass & counting jagged edges. The info is solid, but its of no real use beyond the ps3-xbox wars. Lots of info over here including res for pretty much every game: http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=46241 http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=46241 Or a less tedious summary w/ basic math: http://www.gamerawr.com/2007/09/28/halo-3-only-runs-at-640p/ http://www.gamerawr.com/2007/09/28/halo-3-only-runs-at-640p/
  - pizza 15y ago
    19201080 = 2073600 pixels 1280720 = 921600 pixels So it renders a lot more than twice as many pixels
    - ajross 15y ago
      It renders 12.5% more than twice as many pixels. Maybe that's a lot; my brain doesn't do relative quantities to better than 1 significant figure.
- zokier 15y ago
  1080p? Nope.. It's 720p on consoles. Butter smooth? Many people would say that 25-30 FPS is far cry from butter smooth, especially if compared to modern PC which can achieve up to 120 FPS. edit: About the cost of GPU; according to Tom's Hardware[1], even sub-$100 GPUs are capable of providing console-like performance (30 FPS, medium details, sub-HD resolution) with Skyrim. [1] http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/skyrim-performance-benchmark,3074-5.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/skyrim-performance-bench...
  - lloeki 15y ago
    So what's the real deal? Either the game visibly skips frames in areas like Markrath and Whiterun or it does not. Either the game runs fine on middle-ranged hardware or it does not. If it runs fine on such cheap hardware what's the deal over this optimization stuff? What I heard so far though was that: - Skyrim has performance issues on PCs, even high-end ones - Skyrim's UI is ridiculously contrived on the PC I don't have the foggiest idea if it's true, I just seemed to notice a trend that the PC does not get a first-class version but a port of sorts, a version created from a common denominator. As I said I am very badly placed to compare anything as I have no PC to compare with. Still, I'd like to know what's the reality around this case. For what it's worth personally I'll take a RPG game running at a constant 30fps anytime before a game jumping between 15~60fps (which is what Oblivion did) (And you can pry Forza 4 and its constant 60fps from my cold, dead hands) Besides I could care less if it's upscaled from 720p to 1080p as long as it's not showing upscaling artifacts like aliasing (which it does not). I have a Panasonic 42" plasma TV and watch/play at a comfortable distance so the difference between 720p (which is what the Apple TV outputs on HD movie rentals) and 1080p (which is what the xbox outputs on Full-HD movie rentals) is arguably negligible.
    - vacri 15y ago
      I have a 2-year-old 'nice' whitebox with a nice-but-not-truly-awesome video card from the time (radeon 5770? Catalyst software just lists '5700 series') and it runs fine. Perhaps not 60fps, but it's very rare that I'll notice frame skipping or slowdown, and I've got the quality settings maxxed. So anecdotally, the game doesn't run horribly on all PCs in terms of performance. There are a number of other issues which suck from being a console port though, like the menu system. Dragons being trivial to kill is also a bit sad, but that's not the console port's fault :)
spacemanaki 15y ago
That kind of attitude from "fans" must be difficult to deal with. Skyrim is a really great game, and calling the developers lazy is missing the point entirely. Having worked on products (much, much smaller than Skyrim of course) targeted at different platforms (browsers and mobile OSes) it seems pretty rational to me to make the PC version a console port especially given the breakdown of users on each platform.
- jeltz 15y ago
  Personally I do not think this attitude is hard to deal with. You just have to, despite their tone, not take it personally and calmly thank them for reporting the problems and say that you are working on them (if that is true, which it should be). This is constructive criticism delivered in an ugly way. Complaining customers are the much better than the silent ones or the apologizing fanboys, since then the complainers help you building a better product for everyone.
  - spacemanaki 15y ago
    I upvoted you but I felt strongly that I should reply too. What you say makes a ton of sense and is worth keeping in mind, especially "constructive criticism delivered in an ugly way". Thanks.
ugh 15y ago
I don’t know what it is, this attitude seems so common among gamers.

Not much more to say than this: http://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1321675-how-can-skyrim-be-so-unoptimized-modders-do-better-job-than-bethesda/page__view__findpo

lloeki 15y ago

Indeed Skyrim is butter smooth at 1080p on my 360, even in Markarth and Whiterun. Maybe it's lacking a few bells and whistles compared to a PC powerhouse (whose GPU alone would cost more than my console) but I don't care. Given the performance of Oblivion and Fallout 3 (which was okay-ish) for an inconsistent visual quality (see checkerboard patterns in the hills) I would never have expected Skyrim to achieve such a level. Secondly, the interface on the PC has been criticized, but on the 360 it's just fine. I bet on a PC it's a mere remap from buttons to keys and it just begs for a controller instead of keyboard/mouse. I have no PC to compare with and honestly care less, but from what I hear it shows where (some) priorities lie.

Havoc 15y ago
>Skyrim is butter smooth at 1080p on my 360 Its rendered internally at 1280x720 and then up-scaled (Pretty much all xbox/ps3 games do this). Which is over course a legitimate approach & looks good. In contrast on a PC, it is actually rendered at 1080p without upscaling & so the PC ends up rendering more than twice as many pixels even though both are set to 1080p in the options. So direct PC-Console performance comparisons are a bit tricky.
- alimbada 15y ago
  I run it at 1440x900 on a Core2Quad (Q6600), 8GB RAM and an AMD HD4850 GPU. For the most part it's pretty smooth at high settings with FXAA turned on, but there are times when there's a bit of stutter or freezing especially when I quicksave (something you need to do often since Skyrim is so crash-prone). The reason I agree that Bethesda are lazy (probably more accurate to say apathetic) with fixing the PC version is that they've been doing this for years with previous Elder Scrolls games and Fallout 3 where they've just allowed the "safety net" of the modding community to do their work for them. Of course, that's only possible because of the modding tools they provide, which apparently are great since they get the job done. But, I find that sort of attitude rather insulting as a PC player. Yes, consoles have gone mainstream and are more popular than PC gaming probably by orders of magnitude, but that doesn't mean that PC gaming has declined and that the needs of PC gamers shouldn't be taken seriously.
- gte910h 15y ago
  Where do you have the technical details on that? I have a considerably larger monitor and have been going past that, but would love to know more about detailed specs like this to better tune the game
  - zokier 15y ago
    DigitalFoundry does some technical comparisons of console releases, eg Skyrim triple-platform Face-off: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-face-off-skyrim http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-face-off-sk...
  - Havoc 15y ago
    Somewhere in the xbox vs ps3 religious wars it was discovered that you can deduce the internal rendering resolution via a technique called "pixel-counting". This involves very bored people looking at the individual pixels with a magnifying glass & counting jagged edges. The info is solid, but its of no real use beyond the ps3-xbox wars. Lots of info over here including res for pretty much every game: http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=46241 http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=46241 Or a less tedious summary w/ basic math: http://www.gamerawr.com/2007/09/28/halo-3-only-runs-at-640p/ http://www.gamerawr.com/2007/09/28/halo-3-only-runs-at-640p/
- pizza 15y ago
  19201080 = 2073600 pixels 1280720 = 921600 pixels So it renders a lot more than twice as many pixels
  - ajross 15y ago
    It renders 12.5% more than twice as many pixels. Maybe that's a lot; my brain doesn't do relative quantities to better than 1 significant figure.
zokier 15y ago
1080p? Nope.. It's 720p on consoles. Butter smooth? Many people would say that 25-30 FPS is far cry from butter smooth, especially if compared to modern PC which can achieve up to 120 FPS. edit: About the cost of GPU; according to Tom's Hardware[1], even sub-$100 GPUs are capable of providing console-like performance (30 FPS, medium details, sub-HD resolution) with Skyrim. [1] http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/skyrim-performance-benchmark,3074-5.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/skyrim-performance-bench...
- lloeki 15y ago
  So what's the real deal? Either the game visibly skips frames in areas like Markrath and Whiterun or it does not. Either the game runs fine on middle-ranged hardware or it does not. If it runs fine on such cheap hardware what's the deal over this optimization stuff? What I heard so far though was that: - Skyrim has performance issues on PCs, even high-end ones - Skyrim's UI is ridiculously contrived on the PC I don't have the foggiest idea if it's true, I just seemed to notice a trend that the PC does not get a first-class version but a port of sorts, a version created from a common denominator. As I said I am very badly placed to compare anything as I have no PC to compare with. Still, I'd like to know what's the reality around this case. For what it's worth personally I'll take a RPG game running at a constant 30fps anytime before a game jumping between 15~60fps (which is what Oblivion did) (And you can pry Forza 4 and its constant 60fps from my cold, dead hands) Besides I could care less if it's upscaled from 720p to 1080p as long as it's not showing upscaling artifacts like aliasing (which it does not). I have a Panasonic 42" plasma TV and watch/play at a comfortable distance so the difference between 720p (which is what the Apple TV outputs on HD movie rentals) and 1080p (which is what the xbox outputs on Full-HD movie rentals) is arguably negligible.
  - vacri 15y ago
    I have a 2-year-old 'nice' whitebox with a nice-but-not-truly-awesome video card from the time (radeon 5770? Catalyst software just lists '5700 series') and it runs fine. Perhaps not 60fps, but it's very rare that I'll notice frame skipping or slowdown, and I've got the quality settings maxxed. So anecdotally, the game doesn't run horribly on all PCs in terms of performance. There are a number of other issues which suck from being a console port though, like the menu system. Dragons being trivial to kill is also a bit sad, but that's not the console port's fault :)

spacemanaki 15y ago

That kind of attitude from "fans" must be difficult to deal with. Skyrim is a really great game, and calling the developers lazy is missing the point entirely. Having worked on products (much, much smaller than Skyrim of course) targeted at different platforms (browsers and mobile OSes) it seems pretty rational to me to make the PC version a console port especially given the breakdown of users on each platform.

jeltz 15y ago
Personally I do not think this attitude is hard to deal with. You just have to, despite their tone, not take it personally and calmly thank them for reporting the problems and say that you are working on them (if that is true, which it should be). This is constructive criticism delivered in an ugly way. Complaining customers are the much better than the silent ones or the apologizing fanboys, since then the complainers help you building a better product for everyone.
- spacemanaki 15y ago
  I upvoted you but I felt strongly that I should reply too. What you say makes a ton of sense and is worth keeping in mind, especially "constructive criticism delivered in an ugly way". Thanks.

ugh 15y ago

I don’t know what it is, this attitude seems so common among gamers.