jimmysmitty
Champion
brucek2 :
To the OP: I am running on an i920 @ 3.5ghz with a GTX 460. The game plays smoothly for me at "high" settings, which are the only ones I've tried. There have been several times where video has slowed down dramatically, which I fixed by quitting and restarting. I think this is a bug in the game vs. a lack of hardware -- the exact same spot will play smoothly after the relaunch.
To davegl: have you actually played past the opening scene so you could get a sense of how well the game played overall? That opening scene has special gameplay mechanics in a number of ways, I'd at least want to be sure I'm seeing more of the regular game before I did a whole bunch of investigation or hardware purchases. There's also a new beta nvidia driver that mentions Skyrim in its release notes, I'd try that too. As you know there is currently no SLI support in the released driver and I wonder if having two cards is in fact causing a problem, even if SLI isn't turned on. Finally, consider trying High vs Ultra or a custom setting between the two -- I bet you can get 95% of the visual splendor of Ultra at 60fps no problem if you tinker a bit.
To davegl: have you actually played past the opening scene so you could get a sense of how well the game played overall? That opening scene has special gameplay mechanics in a number of ways, I'd at least want to be sure I'm seeing more of the regular game before I did a whole bunch of investigation or hardware purchases. There's also a new beta nvidia driver that mentions Skyrim in its release notes, I'd try that too. As you know there is currently no SLI support in the released driver and I wonder if having two cards is in fact causing a problem, even if SLI isn't turned on. Finally, consider trying High vs Ultra or a custom setting between the two -- I bet you can get 95% of the visual splendor of Ultra at 60fps no problem if you tinker a bit.
You can probably do ultra but will need to do what I did. To get ultra settings, you need to kill AA and AF and enable FXAA. Before I did that, I was only able to do high. But now I do ultra on a Q6600 @ 3GHz and a HD5870.