So I just bought Skyrim and my first impression was pretty bad... I took advantage of a Steam sale and bought the "Deluxe Package" at 66% off. I have seen worse cases of consolitis before but I always thought of the Elder scrolls as a PC series so it kinda pains me to see skyrim presents itself like a half botched console port. Initially the game was unplayable. The controls were ultra laggy and the mouse in menu was sluggish. I spent hours setting the game so it plays OK. Had to read through forum posts, conflicting information and bloated youtube tutorial before the thing got decently playable. The setting menu is crippled, most options are only available with editing the .ini file and if you do the wrong things the game overrides them. Its been a long while since I spent this much time simply setting a game up. It wont even properly "alt-tab" without glitching, making the whole process even worse. Then the UI is a complete horror and the game seems designed to use a "360 controller" rather than mouse and keyboard. I seriously thought about asking for a refund but then I researched about skyrim mods and installed some mods that fixes the worse issues I had so two days after I initially bought the game, I can finally begin to play it. Chief among them is -SkyUI . This makes the UI MUCH better, without this mod the game was just broken for me. It also allows Item presets to 123456etc keys. But in skyrim the default system is complete junk. I also installed a mod that allows you to jump while sprinting. Because obviously, jumping while sprinting is something totally unrealistic so it was omitted in the default game. And then I installed another mod that adds Acrobatic perks to the game. This was my favorite set of perks in oblivion, so obviously they decided to remove them in Skyrim. That mod is a bit rough and is still WIP but its better than nothing.
It needs some tweaking for most users on PC to be happy with it to be honest. It's a good game, but the awful porting kinda ruined it for a lot of folk. Once you go through the forums and edit all the things you want + add mods, you'll have a right old blast.
To be fair, I played it on console first, then extracted my save and moved to PC afterwards - so thats probably why I didnt have any issues
It was the first game I tested on my PC thats not for gaming at all, but I bought a higher end graphics card for. I only have 1 GB of RAM installed and my CPU was from 2008 and I can run it flawlessly. BUT I wasn't running the Steam version, I was running the game that had been installed from a mounted ISO in Windows 8. So, maybe thats the difference?
I have a Core 2 Quad Q6700 @3ghz, 8 gig ram and a Gefore GTX 460. A bit on the old side now but still a decent setup, my problem was not so much bad frame rate but rather the weird input lag in the controls. To remove it I had to remove Vsync and mouse acceleration in the .ini file and lower the resolution one notch. Otherwise I could not use the High quality setting without the input lag. I usually play games with Vsync as tearing annoys me and normally I do not feel the lag or just barely. But In skyrim I get like half a second of lag its just ridiculous. Thankfully the tearing is not too bad. With all the things Ive done the game looks good and run smooth witout lag. Now I can finally say I can enjoy the game and yes, it is good and immersive. I still miss a few things from the earlier Elder Scrolls but nothing game breaking and the new things and improvements to the series make it a good title. Still it was frustrating not being able to enjoy the game out of the box. Less tech savy PC users will likely be stuck with the default game and for many it is not good. Judging by all the threads of complaint I found on the subject I was not the only PC user to have lag problem in skyrim, far from it. Also, if you have Skyrim on the PC, I urge you to try SkyUI mod, if you have not already. I cannot imagine ever going back to the default interface. Most of what it does is revamp the interface to take advantage of Keyboard/mouse setup but it also adds customizable equipment presets. You can assign any weapon/armor/spell to a group and change them on the fly. This is much more powerful than the default favorite weapon scheme.
As I said above, mine worked out the box. But my PC isnt as old as yours (and its not still a decent setup really, that processor is at least 5 years old - which in computing is pretty ancient)
It doesn't matter how good your computer is, the game itself performs poor due to forced Vsync To get the game running smoother you need to turn the Vsync off in the config file, then start tweaking the rest of the options to suit you
You either got lucky somehow or didn't notice it. From my experience it's the mouse response that is the issue. If you choose to use a pad instead, you won't really notice it. I could put up with it, but I personally got too used to super responsive movement in FPS games I guess. One of my friends plays Skyrim as is and he has no complaints, so go figure! lol
V-Sync isnt evil, long as your machine can do 60 FPS solid, you are all good. if you cant, what would be 50fps soon equals 30. Which is why vsync off would be better.
My first experience with the game was on the 360 and I have to admit, moving to the PC was really difficult at first. In game playability was fine but yeah, the menus etc were hard to get used to.
Maybe you should reevaluate your definition of 'decent'. This computer still does all that I ask of it and plays pretty much all new games well enough. To stay close to the original subject, my ancient computer is still above the recommended hardware for Skyrim on PC. I initially used the auto detect hardware after game installation and it set itself to High detail setting with full resolution, vsync and all. Not bad for a dinosaur uh? The frame rate was good but the input lag was not. If you look on the net there are tons of people complaining about this. Saying that it is because my computer is too old is silly considering it is above Bethesda's own recommended hardware. Maybe this does not happen on more recent hardware such as yours but the bottom line is that the issue obviously stems from sloppy porting and insufficient testing on PC hardware.
I had a Q6600 until I upgraded. Your processor came out in 2007 thats 6 years. Your PC is old, get over it. Hell, my PC is old too. Technology moves fast, try to keep up!
Only if it sits there doing nothing while waiting for vsync. It should still be able to skip a frame to get ahead and then render a couple of frames & queue them up for displaying at the appropriate time.
Which adds input lag, as described. And lag is evil. My comment saying its not evil implys what you describe is not happening, because if it is, that's not good. If you are rending parts of the game in advance, before the input has happened - its going to feel wrong.
I bought the walking dead look how far off the cursor is. The menu is impossible to use, ingame will be even worse.
I did walking dead on pc, but used pad for that. I can see if mines like that with a mouse tomorrow though.
I have other games that run quite bellow 60fps, mostly strategy games like fallen enchantress, when the map gets filled with crap in late game the scrolling is quite choppy. I still have Vsync on and the controls are not laggy. The cursor moves immediately and I can use keys to navigate to menues without feeling the kind of lag that happens in Skyrim. The lag in skyrim happens immediately when you start the game, not only when the game is taxing your hardware. It starts in the intro menu where everything runs at 60 fps but the mouse is still like almost half a second late. I am not talking about a little few frame lag here, its a friggin massive delay. It can also be felt on the keyboard.
Didn't have any of those issues back when I played it, but the game was sort of disappointing for me There was no jump in specs like from morrowing to oblivion, if you played fallout3 there are just a few tech improvements here and there, but still the same shitty robot faces, stiff animation and buggy as fuck experience. Honestly why was this game so hyped to begin with?
