Introduction
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is the fifth installment in Bethesda Game Studios' The Elder Scrolls franchise of role-playing games. Skyrim was released by Bethesda Softworks and Zenimax Media on November 11th, 2011 to widespread critical acclaim. Previous Elder Scrolls entries Oblivion and Morrowind in the series proved to be immensely popular, and are in fact still played today in spite of being five and nine years old, respectively. Skyrim has so far earned a 94.75% rating on GameRankings, and 95/100 rating on Metacritic.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a first or third-person action role-playing game, or action RPG. Action RPGs vary from traditional RPGs primarily by utilizing real-time combat mechanics. While traditional RPGs might be turn-based, or at least force a delay between attacks, action-RPGs allow more fluid, real-time combat, relying on the player's reflexes to determine success in battle. Skyrim is merely the latest in a very long line of action-RPGs, dating back to 1984. Those internal die-rolls do still happen in Skyrim, but they are calculated in real-time as the player performs his or her actions. The success and magnitude of an attack is thus not only determined by the character's assortment of skills, but also by the player's skill at maneuvering attacks.
Skyrim is a single-player only game. It takes place 200 years after the events of Oblivion, and the gamer plays a character referred to as Dovahkiin, or Dragonborn, being a person born with a dragon's blood and a dragon's soul. As such, it is up to the player to rescue the world from the resurfaced scourge of marauding dragons. The game world is immense and features a wide variety of environments ranging from farmland to ancient dwarven ruins, to expansive frozen wastelands. The game is epic in both scale and feel.
The Technology
Skyrim does not technically use the Gamebryo engine, that previous game Oblivion was based on, as well as many other Bethesda games. However, the new engine that Bethesda developed is highly built from the Gamebryo engine, at its base. According to Bethesda Community Manager Nick Breckon here, Skyrim's engine "is all-new, and it looks fantastic." Bethesda Game Studios has dubbed Skyrim's engine theCreation Engine.
The Creation Engine offers several improvements over Gamebryo for Skyrim. The Creation Engine allows a greater draw distance and dynamic shadows to be created by any object in the game. In fact, when you "wait" (press T) in-game, you can see shadows shift around with the movement of the sun across the sky. In addition, while Oblivion used SpeedTree to render trees, Creation Engine handles that duty for Skyrim. The Creation Engine allows developers to give weight to branches, which influences how the trees react to wind. The effect of wind is a constant and extremely visible thing in Skyrim. Trees, water, and snow all gets blown around by the wind all the time. The Creation Engine also allows for dynamic snowfall. Being far to the north, the province of Skyrim is a cold realm, and it snows a lot. In some places, it seems to snow constantly. Where snow was merely a static texture effect in previous Elder Scrolls games, it is now a dynamic effect rendered in real-time by the game engine.
The Creation Engine uses Havok for physics calculations, and all physics are done via the CPU. Havok is used for character animation. This is visible in-game when walking up or down steps, or across uneven terrain. The character's body moves in realistic ways.
Skyrim is a DX9-only game. There is no DX10 renderer or DX11 renderer in this game. DirectX 9.0c is what is used, and there aren't any exciting DX11 features we've come to experience in recent games. Beyond that, there aren't even some DX9 features we've come to enjoy in other DX9 games, such as soft shadows. We'll talk about this more in the IQ page, but this game seems to be a mix of image quality, and in some ways doesn't even challenge the capabilities of DX9. While we don't equate eye-candy with quality, we have powerful DX11 capable video cards, and for a late 2011 game, we'd expect PC games to be pushing the bounds of graphics utilizing the power of today's video cards.
Evaluation Method
We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and "eye candy" graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home. Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing based on real gameplay as well.
Test System Setup
For our test system platform we are using an ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution motherboard with an Intel Core i7 920 overclocked to 3.6GHz, and 6GB of Corsair DDR3-1600. For the power supply, we will be using aCoolerMaster Real Power Pro 1250W.
We use the 3.6GHz overclocked quad-core processor in an attempt to keep from putting our evaluation into a position of being CPU limited. We make every effort to not use CPU limited games for video card evaluations, but the 3.6GHz processor seems to put many peoples’ minds at ease when it comes to that subject.
Video Card Drivers
New video card drivers have come down from NVIDIA and AMD recently, even during our testing of this game. This month has had a lot of game releases, and NVIDIA and AMD are hard at work on supporting these games and improving performance. One of the key support items in new games is supporting multi-GPU acceleration with NVIDIA's SLI and AMD's CrossFireX. For Skyrim, NVIDIA released a driver version one day before the launch of Skyrim that brought SLI support to Skyrim. As of this date, AMD does not have a driver that supports CrossFireX in Skyrim yet. A driver is pending, that will give us that support, but it may not arrive until late in the week.
NVIDIA - For all NVIDIA-based video cards in this evaluation, we are using NVIDIA's ForceWare 285.79 Betapackage, dated November 10th, 2011. ForceWare 285.79 was released on November 10th, a day beforeSkyrim and brings with it SLI profile support for Skyrim. This is currently the best NVIDIA driver to use forSkyrim.
AMD - For all AMD-based video cards in this evaluation, we are using AMD's Catalyst 11.11 WHQL driver package dated November 15th, 2011, as well as the Catalyst Application Profiles 11.11 Cap 2.
With this latest driver and CAP there is no CrossFireX support in Skyrim. In light of this we could not include the dual AMD Radeon HD 6970 CrossFireX option in this evaluation. The configuration is unsupported currently, and if you try to run it with CFX enabled you will see negative scaling. It is best to run Skyrim with a single-AMD GPU only currently, for the best performance.
Configuring Skyrim
In spite of the fact that Skyrim's creation engine is new for this game, its graphics options are reminiscent ofOblivion since the engine is based on Gamebryo. The in-game options consist mostly of a series of fade sliders, which determine the distance from the camera at which objects either lose detail or are entirely excluded from rendering. It is best to use the out-of-game launcher video options to select all your graphics settings. With them, you can select resolution, detail levels, anti-aliasing and other options.
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When we first click "Options" at the launcher, we are greeted with a small interface that allows us to select some critical settings. First, we can choose our video card we wish to play off of on a specific display. Then we can configure the aspect ratio and resolution. There are options for Anti-Aliasing (Off, 2X, 4X, and 8X) and Anisotropic Texture Filtering (Off, 2X, 4X, 8X, and 16X). Then we have a series of 5 buttons that allow us to configure Skyrim's many graphics options (which can be accessed by clicking the "Advanced..." button) with one click.
Low : Clicking the Low button disables AA and AF. It sets Texture Quality to Medium, Radial Blur and Shadow Quality to Low, and Decal Quantity to None. It disables FXAA, as well as land, tree, and object reflections in the water, but enables Sky reflections. It sets the Object, Actor, Specularity, and Light Fade options to 2, the Grass Fade option to 0, the Item Fade option to 1. It also enables Object Detail Fade sets Distant Object Detail to Low.
Medium : Clicking the Medium button disables AF and selects 4X AA and enables FXAA. Texture Quality is set to High, Radial Blur Quality is set to Low, and Shadow Detail and Decal Quantity are both set to Medium. Land reflections in the water are enabled, but Tree, Object, and Sky reflections are disabled. Object Fade is set to 2, Specularity Fade is set to 5, Light Fade is set to 10, and Actor, Grass, and Item fade are all set to 3. Object detail fade is enabled and Distant Object Detail is set to Medium.
High : Clicking High enables 8X AA and 8X AF, but disables FXAA. Texture Quality, Shadow Quality, and Decal Quantity are set to High, while Radial Blur Quality is set to Medium. Water reflections of Land, Objects, and Trees are enabled, but Sky reflections are disabled. Object Fade is set to 7, Actor Fade is set to 6, Grass Fade is set to 5, Specularity Fade is set to 10, Light Fade is set to 25, and Item Fade is set to 4. Distant Object Detail is set to High and Object Detail Fade is disabled.
Ultra : Clicking the Ultra button sets maximum settings. It selects 8X AA and 16X AF, but FXAA remains disabled. Texture and Radial Blur Quality are set to High (the highest options available), and Shadow Detail and Decal Quantity are set to Ultra (also the highest options available). Land, Trees, Object, and Sky water reflections are all enabled. All fade sliders are set to their highest positions: Object, Actor, and Item fade are all at 15, Grass Fade is at 7, Specularity Fade is at 20, and Light Fade is at 35. Distant Object Detail is set to Ultra. Object Detail Fade is disabled.
Default : Clicking the default button causes the configuration program to attempt to auto-detect the computer's graphics hardware and set the graphics options accordingly. In our testing, we found that rather than adjust each setting in a granular fashion, the Default button simply chooses either the Low, Medium, High, or the Ultra preset. For our purposes, we clicked "Ultra" and then chose the resolution and anti-aliasing options most appropriate for the video card we were testing. Of course we verified that the settings were properly selected and applied, but we had no need to individually alter graphics settings.
The individual settings themselves are self-explanatory. Texture quality determines the resolution of textures used. Higher resolution textures show more detail and are therefore of higher quality. Radial Blur Quality changes the quality of the blur effect that is used when taking damage (and for some other events as well). Choosing a higher setting here results in a smoother blur effect. Shadow detail determines the resolution of shadows used. Even Ultra shadows can look pretty bad in this game sometimes. Decal Quantity controls the number of decals (blood spatters, burn marks, etc.) that are visible in-game.
All of the fade options control the distance at which certain graphical features are no longer drawn. The Distant Object detail determines the quality at which distant objects are rendered. A lower setting here will show lower quality meshes for objects far away from the camera. The Object Detail Fade setting fades distant objects in and out, in order to stop objects from just popping in and out, which is distracting.
A Note About VSYNC
Curiously absent from the game's graphics options menu is a VSYNC toggle. VSYNC is on by default inSkyrim, and thus there is no in-game way to disable it. Some gamers always use VSYNC and won't mind the lack of that option, but some gamers don't use it, so it could be a problem for some. We always disable VSYNC for performance testing as it artificially inhibits performance, so this was a problem for us.
Gamers with NVIDIA video cards can forcibly disable VSYNC in the NVIDIA control panel. When we did so, VSYNC was disabled in the game, so that was easy enough for us with NVIDIA GPUs. However, that doesn't work for AMD video card users, though in this game. For them, the only reliable way to do it is to add a line containing the text "iPresentInterval=0" to the "..\My Documents\My Games\SkyrimPrefs.ini" file, at the end of the section labeled "[Display]".
When disabling VSYNC on NVIDIA video cards (whether through the INI setting or the NVIDIA control panel), the 60 FPS framerate cap is lifted. This is not the case with AMD video cards. They are still limited to 60 FPS, even with VSYNC disabled in the INI file AND the driver control panel. It's not really a problem for gaming, but for performance testing, it's an issue that can cause differences. We tried our best, but we just couldn't get past 60 FPS on AMD GPUs, while NVIDIA GPUs had no issue going well past 60 FPS with VSYNC disabled.
Testing Skyrim
To test Skyrim, we played this game for a good length of time and were able to visit every major part of the game map to find the most graphically intense areas. At around level 20, after successfully fighting off the chief antagonist, we got down to testing. We found that the view from the Dragonsreach fort in Whiterun to be one of the most demanding areas of the entire game. From that point, one can see almost the entire city of Whiterun, as well as a large amount of surrounding scenery and smaller fortifications.
For our test, we started from this point in the early morning and walked (slowly) through the town. We then exited the main gate and mounted our patiently waiting horse. From there we ran from the Whiterun gate in a generally north-east direction through some wide open terrain, along a river valley, through a pine forest, and eventually to the bridge leading to the city of Windhelm. This test procedure takes about 10 minutes to complete.
Skyrim is somewhat more random than Oblivion. When we were using Oblivion to test games, we witnessed the same creatures, enemies, NPCs, and weather events every time we tested it. In Skyrim, however, these things were much more randomized. Sometimes it grew foggy during the trip, and sometimes it rained and snowed. Encounters with creatures and NPCs were at predictable locations, but the nature of these encounters varied. Sometimes we ran into great saber-tooth cats, sometimes wolves, and sometimes giant spiders. So there is some slight unavoidable randomness to testing in Skyrim.
Highest Playable Settings
There are many antialiasing options available to us with Skyrim, from traditional AA supported in Skyrim to FXAA to traditional Supersampling and Multisampling for alpha textures. Because we have so many AA options available, we had to reduce the abbreviations in order to fit on our tables on this page. So for all the tables on this page, the abbreviations used stand for the following:
FXAA - NVIDIA's shader based AA method, which works on both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs in this game and is selectable from the graphics launcher out-of-game. This AA method provides AA on all game objects, alpha textures, and specular shading. It can be used in combination with traditional AA, or by itself.
TSA - This is NVIDIA's Transparency Supersampling AA (TR SSAA) method, which can be enabled via the driver control panel on NVIDIA GPUs. This provides AA on all alpha textures such as grass, trees and vegetation in the game. This is a highly graphically intensive option, and can be quite demanding, but provides the best IQ on alpha textures only.
TMA - This is NVIDIA's Transparency Multisampling AA (TR MSAA) method, which can be enabled on NV GPUs in the driver control panel. This provides a minor reduction of AA on alpha textures, such as grass, trees and vegetation. It is much faster than TR SSAA, but lacks the IQ of TR SSAA, it is better than nothing and can improve aliasing to a minor degree in Skyrim.
AMA - This is AMD's Adaptive MSAA, and can be enabled via the driver control panel on AMD GPUs. This is similar to NVIDIA's TR MSAA, and is a fast form of providing AA on trees, grass and vegetation.
Beyond that, traditional MSAA is represented by specifying 2X AA, 4X AA or 8X AA.
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Unfortuntely, we could not include Radeon HD 6970 CrossFireX in this evaluation, due to lack of CrossFireX support at this time. However, SLI works, and with GeForce GTX 580 SLI it works really well allowing a high level of gameplay experience in Skyrim.
At 2560x1600, performance in Skryim is exceptionally high using the GeForce GTX 580 SLI option. With the in-game settings at the maximum values, the average frame rate was up near 70 FPS. Enabling Transparency Anti-Aliasing with the 8X Super-Sampling option soaked up some of those "extra" frames and gave us a visible improvement in the smoothness of foliage and grass objects, and it didn't make the view at the top of Whiterun unplayable.
The single GeForce GTX 580 had some problems with Transparency Super-Sampling, so we turned that down to Transparency Multi-Sampling. Performance was improved, but with FXAA already enabled, there was little improvement in the anti-aliasing of transparent textures. Still, it was a little better, and it didn't challenge the game's playability, so we left it enabled.
The AMD Radeon HD 6970 easily handled Ultra settings at 2560x1600 with 8X AA and 16X AF selected, but was just barely on the wrong side of unplayable with FXAA enabled. Disabling that option noticeably increased the occurrence of aliased edges on transparent textures and specular surfaces, but there wasn't much we could do about that. Both in-game FXAA and Control Panel MLAA took too large a performance hit to leave it enabled. Even still, the game was still smooth and enjoyable, and while the aliasing was noticeable, it wasn't deal-breaking.
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The GeForce GTX 570 was playable at 2560x1600 with 8X AA and FXAA enabled, as well as Ultra settings and 16X AF. That means that the GTX 570 is faster than the Radeon HD 6970 in Skyrim . That hasn't exactly been unheard-of, but it isn't that common either. AMD really has some work to do with respect to performance on its video cards in Skyrim.
The Radeon HD 6950 performed just under the level of the HD 6970, being playable at 2560x1600 with 4X AA, 16X AF, and Ultra in-game settings enabled. Again, specular and transparency aliasing was visible, but not a tremendous deal for us at this resolution. It would have been nice to be able to use FXAA or Adaptive AA, but it just wasn't in the cards at 2560x1600. At 1920x1200, 8X AA + FXAA was very playable, and those problems were reduced significantly. Even at 1920x1200, however, Adaptive AA had too big of a performance hit to be usable.
Neither the GeForce GTX 560 Ti nor the Radeon HD 6870 were playable at 2560x1600 with even 4X AA selected. As such, we chose to lower the resolution to 1920x1200 so that we could have more freedom to use higher AA levels. The GeForce GTX 560 Ti was playable with 8X AA, FXAA, and 4X Transparency Super-Sampling selected. The Radeon HD 6870 was playable with 4X AA, FXAA, and Adaptive Multi-Sampling selected. Taking the HD 6870 up to 8X AA or Adaptive Super-Sampling brought average framerates down to the mid-30s, and performance in Whiterun and the dense pine forest suffered too much to be considered playable.
Apples to Apples Performance Comparisons
The following tests for these apples-to-apples performance comparisons were performed at 1920x1200 with 4X AA, 16X AF, and "Ultra" in-game graphics options selected.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 vs. AMD Radeon HD 6970
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Because we were not able to overcome 60 FPS with the AMD Radeon HD 6970, it appears to be doing worse than the GeForce GTX 580 at 1920x1200 if you look only at the numbers. However, if you look at the graph, we can see that the two video cards perform extremely close to each other at this resolution. In our highest playable settings testing, we found the GTX 580 to be a lot faster than the HD 6970 at 2560x1600, but here they are close to even. This lack of performance difference at a lower resolution suggests that this game is CPU limited rather than GPU limited at this resolution.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 vs. AMD Radeon HD 6950
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Again, the numbers and the graph tell a different story. While the GeForce GTX 570 is clearly faster than the Radeon HD 6950, the numbers are misleading because the HD 6950 could not go above 60 FPS.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti vs. AMD Radeon HD 6870
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As before, we witnessed very close performance with these competitors at 1920x1200.The GeForce GTX 560 Ti clearly has the advantage, but the numbers are exaggerated by the 60 FPS cap inflicted on the Radeon HD 6870.
Multi-GPU Scaling
Since it appears that Skyrim is CPU limited at lower resolutions, we wanted to check out how effective multi-GPU scaling is. First, we'll show you the negative scaling inflicted upon Radeon HD 6970 due to lack of CrossFireX support. As we mentioned on page 2, AMD does not have working CrossFireX support for Skyrimyet. So we will show you what happens if you do try to play Skyrim with Radeon HD 6970 CrossFireX.
AMD Radeon HD 6970 CrossFireX
These tests were performed at 1920x1200 with 4X AA, 16X AF, and Ultra in-game settings selected.
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Not only does it not work, it works backward. When we installed the second video card and enabled CrossFireX, performance was cut in half. The game was just not playable with this configuration. This performance comparison proves that if you are running an AMD dual-GPU solution, disable the second GPU and play with a single-GPU for the best performance in Skyrim right now until AMD releases CrossFireX support.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 SLI
NVIDIA had an updated driver for Skyrim the night before the game actually launched, which provided SLI profile support in Skyrim. We expected SLI to work here, but given that the game has so far seemed to be CPU limited, we weren't sure how great performance scaling was going to be.
These tests were performed at 1920x1200 with 4X AA, 16X AF, and Ultra in-game settings selected.
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As expected, SLI scaling was functional but limited. We saw an improvement of only 14.3% at 1920x1200.
But what happens if we increase those settings? In the past, we have seen that multi-GPU performance scaling improves when you push video cards harder. Maybe Skyrim works that way. These tests were performed at 2560x1600 with 8X AA, FXAA, 16X AF, and Ultra in-game settings.
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When we increased resolution and AA settings, we saw the performance delta scale up to about 23.6%. This is not exactly the best scaling, in fact, it is pretty poor.Skyrim may be one of those games that just isn't a very multi-GPU friendly of a game. Still, even at a small 23% scaling, it was enough to allow 580 SLI to push all the AA settings to the highest levels with Transparency Supersampling, improving the gameplay experience quite a bit, so it does help enough by allowing those higher AA settings.
Image Quality
There are a few graphics settings in Skyrim that make a big difference to us. The biggest is the Shadows setting, followed by the Anti-Aliasing options. On this page, we're going to show you the effect of those settings. We'll also show some random screenshots to illustrate some things we found in the world that are worth talking about.
Shadows
Even on Ultra, shadows in Skyrim are not up to par with other current DX11 2011 games. They are rendered at a low resolution, and they have that familiar stair-stepping appearance that Oblivion sought to avoid by introducing soft shadow technology.
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This comparison depicts the shadow cast by a structural beam of Dragonsreach tower onto the wooden walkway leading to the castle entrance. As we can see, even on Ultra, the shadow has a jagged edge. There is little quality difference between Ultra and High in this image, but when we go down to Medium it just looks terrible. The edges are even more jagged and indistinct. Going to Low from Medium doesn't change this particular scene very much.
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Here we can more clearly see the difference between Ultra and High Shadow Quality. The tree shadow in the lower level of the screenshot looks pretty decent from a distance with Ultra selected. When we go down to High, it loses most of what little detail it had, and the shadow beyond the trunk seems to have disappeared. With Medium and Low selected, there are no visible shadows anywhere in the scene.
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In this comparison, we can see shadows cast by characters and set pieces (the barricade). Again, there is little difference in quality between Ultra and High, likely because the shadows are not far enough in the distance to be lose more detail and be faded by the High Shadows setting. When we go to medium, there is a clear loss in quality in both the character shadow and the barricade shadow. The jagged edges of the shadows give them a rippled appearance. If we then look at the Low setting on the far right, we can see that the character shadow has lost more definition, and the barricade shadow has begun to look splotchy. So while none of these look great, Ultra does at least look better than the other options.
Beyond that, when in movement in the game the jagged edges of the shadows are apparent, and distracting to gameplay. We even experienced some shadow feathering effects that appeared randomly, which could be a bug, or just a nature of the dynamic shadows. At any rate, it was bad, and not indicative of what DX11 soft shadows can bring to a game. We also so no hint of Ambient Occlusion, something this game needs badly.
Anti-Aliasing
Skyrim supports a variety of anti-aliasing options both by way of in-game options and from control panel options as well. Each option has its own strengths and weaknesses, so we wanted to show what gamers can expect these options to do.
The top section of this comparison shows AA disabled, the second shows 2X AA, the third 4X AA, and the bottom section shows 8X AA. Neither FXAA nor Transparency AA were enabled here.
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Some games (such as the Battlefield series) have had a hard time effectively utilizing multi-sampling anti-aliasing technology when post-processing lighting techniques such as HDR are also in use. Skyrim does not have this problem. Looking at the edge of the roof and the decorative dragon heads we can clearly see that the edges are effectively smoothed when MSAA is in use, and the edges appear more jagged when MSAA is disabled. In this particular scene at least, there is little visible difference between 4X AA and 8X AA, but 2X AA is visible inferior, particularly around the dragon head in the middle of the frame.
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In this scene, 2X AA is hardly any better than no AA at all. Even 4X AA struggles to smooth the extreme angles on the hanging icicles. 8X MSAA looks pretty good, but without the ability to smooth the jagged edges of the small tree on the left, we are left wanting more.
That's where FXAA comes in. The following comparison shows the difference between just 8X AA, 8X AA with FXAA, and 8X AA with FXAA and 8X Transparency SSAA from the NVIDIA control panel.
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In this comparison, we can see that 8X AA simply does nothing for the tree's blossoms. The leaves and flowers are as jagged as they would be if MSAA was disabled, because traditional MSAA works only with geometry edges, not alpha texture edges.
If we turn on FXAA, we see a slight reduction in the jaggedness of the texture edges, but it's still not great.
Finally, if we turn 8X TR SSAA on in addition to 8X AA and FXAA, we see a massive improvement. The branches, leaves, and flowers look smooth and there isn't an aliased edge in sight.
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This comparison shows the same thing. With just 8X AA enabled, the mountains in the background look nice, but the bush in the foreground looks terrible. Enabling FXAA helps this particular scene a lot, and adding 8X TR SSAA to that makes it even better.
But what happens if we take FXAA out of the equation and just use 8X AA with 8X TR SSAA? The far left panel of this screenshot shows just 8X AA. The second panel from the left shows 8X AA and FXAA working together. The next panel over shows 8X AA and 8X TR SSAA, without FXAA running. Finally, the panel on the far right shows 8X AA with FXAA and 8X TR SSAA all running.
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The 8X AA panel looks familiar. The house is effectively anti-aliased, but the grass and the tree are jagged. In addition to that, the snow on the roof of the house looks awful as well. When we add FXAA to that equation in the next frame to the right, the grass at the bottom of the frame is nicely anti-aliased. The tree looks a better too, but it still has some rough patches. Also, with FXAA in the picture, the snow on the roof of the building has lost its pixilated appearance. When we disable FXAA and enable 8X TR SSAA, the grass and tree look better than with FXAA, but the snow on the roof is back to looking jagged and pixilated. Finally, on the far right panel, FXAA and 8X TR SSAA work together with 8X MSAA to effectively smooth the edges on the house, the grass, the tree, and the snow.
Texture Inconsistencies
In Skyrim, we find a mixture of well-conceived, sharply textured environments, and environments that look like the developers were worried about running out of texture space on their development consoles. Some textures look good, and some look blurry. They get the point across, but not very convincingly. The following are some examples of this mixed experience. These screenshots are presented at 1920x1200 with 4X AA.
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The first image above shows a room from The Dark Brotherhood's Sanctuary. While the textures in the room are of good quality, they are also inconsistent. The stone wall textures are noticeably less crisp than the red flags. While it looks generally OK at first, the inconsistency is pretty glaring after a few moments of looking at the image.
The second screenshot shows the ground and a tree stump. Most gamers are probably not doing a lot of staring at this kind of prop while playing, but we found it to be quite noticeable. The texture on the cut wood surface is blurry and poorly color matched to the bark texture. To us, it looks like the cut texture was painted on, a representation of a tree stump, rather than an actual tree stump.
The third image above is of the floor inside one of the many caves in Skyrim. Like most other things, it looks mostly "OK" and works as a suggestion of a dirty cave floor covered with various bits of debris. It's not awful, but it's noticeably lower resolution than some of the objects around it. Again, it represents a dirt floor, but it isn't convincing.
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In the first screenshot above, we see a nicely detailed rope wrapped around a blurry and indistinct log. Both the rope and the ground around the log are noticeably sharper in appearance than the log itself.
In this screenshot, we see the sort of quick and dirty way some of the mountain sides are treated. While most of the mountains look OK, there are portions that are strangely shaded and have very blurred out textures.
This last screenshot shows a very odd little patch of snow on a walk way. This might be a result of the dynamic weather system, but it looks strange. The surface looks very flat, and the shading doesn't make any sense at all. It doesn't even look anything like the walkway right next to it.
These are but a few examples in the game, there are many more. We are going to take a closer look at texture quality in a follow-up article this week.
Gameplay Performance Summary
Most of the time, performance is very high in Skyrim. There are few areas in the game which actually challenge the graphics cards we used in this evaluation. During most of our testing, the FRAPS FPS counter was pegged at 60 (since we did our initial testing on a Radeon HD 6970). It wasn't hard to find a good testing procedure, but gamers should know that what we are showing here represents what we feel to be the worst case scenario for performance in Skyrim. A lot of the game involves either traversing the wilderness or hacking through dungeons and ruins. In those scenarios, performance is quite high.
We witnessed the very best performance with a pair of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580s installed and operating in SLI mode. After that, the single GeForce GTX 580 was the best performer, followed by the GeForce GTX 570. AMD video cards have some performance issues in Skyrim, and we do hope that AMD can improve this with driver updates. It would be difficult to recommend an AMD video card to any gamer looking to upgrade his or her computer in order to play Skyrim. For this game at least, NVIDIA-GPU based current generation video cards is where it's at, whether you are packing a 30" monitor running at 2560x1600, a 1080p panel, or a multi-monitor gaming solution, they are simply faster.
Multi-GPU Scaling Woes
Skyrim is a DX9 game, a DX9 game that is based on the Gamebryo game engine, and uses Havok physics accelerated via the CPU. In our testing, we've found this game to be rather on the CPU dependent side of things. Given the older graphics nature of this game, it doesn't seem to be very multi-GPU friendly. Meaning, you won't see efficient multi-GPU acceleration performance in this game. Our NVIDIA SLI scaling showed that even at 2560x1600 with 8X MSAA + FXAA SLI scaling was in the lower 20% range. This is one of the lowest scaling games we've seen in a very long time. For a late 2011 game, this is very poor. It just seems to be the nature of the game engine.
While the GPU scaling is low, what multi-GPU allows us to do in this game is push the AA settings up to incredibly high levels. Think of it this way, we have tons of GPU performance not being utilized in this game, so the only way to utilize it is to artificially push it using extra AA options you can enable. Those AA options are FXAA (which is a shader based AA method) and Transparency AA. Turning on FXAA is one way to utilize the power of multi-GPU in this game, turning it on doesn't cause a performance drop and allows much better image quality. Another way to utilize dual-GPU performance is to enable Transparency AA. NVIDIA allows you to set 2X, 4X and 8X Transparency Supersampling from the control panel. This improves AA on trees, grass, vegetation in a much more high quality way than FXAA.
We were able to have 8X MSAA + 8X TR SSAA enabled in this game with 580 SLI, utilizing the power of both GPUs. When it was all said and done, we were able to have 8X MAAA + 8X TR SSAA + FXAA enabled with 580 SLI. This allowed an incredibly better visual quality difference over a single GeForce GTX 580. So while we don't see a great amount of scaling in this game, we have a ton of GPU performance we can use in other ways to improve image quality in this game. That is, with NVIDIA GPUs. With AMD GPUs, you can't right now.
AMD does not yet have CrossFireX support in this game. That support is coming, and you should see it by the end of this week, but it will be 2 weeks since this game launched that we finally see that support, while NVIDIA users have had this support and ability to run at high AA settings since game launch. There are reasons behind this, and scaling is one of them. This game as we mentioned is not multi-GPU friendly, and it's not easy to get working. It is going to take a driver update, not a CAP update, from AMD in order to give you CrossFireX support. When that happens, we expect to see Radeon HD 6970 CrossFireX give us the same type of AA support that GTX 580 SLI can give us right now. That is, we should be able to turn on 8X MSAA + Adaptive Supersmapling + FXAA and have the performance to push that. Once that driver is available, we'll certainly test that scenario and let you know if it's possible.
This, unfortunately is the problem with SLI and CrossFireX both, that we dislike, being based on driver profiles. More often than not, gamers are forced to wait for multi-GPU profiles in new games to enjoy the fastest performance. More so lately, we've seen AMD GPU users waiting the longest times, and the most, for new games to support CrossFireX. As it stands now, gamers who have invested $700 or more into multi-GPU solutions with two or more AMD Radeon HD 6970s are getting a gameplay experience from Skyrim that is on the level with what can be had from a single $300 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570. That's just not a good value, and we find it unacceptable. AMD has improved in this respect compared to past game releases, but they still have a lot of work to do.
Brilliant Gameplay, Humdrum Graphics
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim falls into the category of games sporting brilliant gameplay backed by compelling writing, but which also have graphics that ultimately let the rest of the game down. Don't mistake our meaning here: this game looks damn good. But graphically speaking, it's really nothing special for a 2011 game. It looks better than Oblivion did out of the box. Skyrim has mediocre textures and bad shadows.Oblivion's soft shadows looked better than Skyrim's hard-edged dynamic shadows.
In its gameplay, Skyrim feels like a PC game. The UI can feel a bit obtuse until you get used to it, but its gameplay mechanics show none of the telltale signs of this being fundamentally a console game that has been adapted for the PC. But in terms of graphics, we definitely get the feeling that the PC's more advanced functionality and higher performance profile was largely ignored by the developers. Skyrim looks fine, we were hoping for something better. Oblivion was the 800 pound gorilla of its day, and Skyrim fails to live up to that legacy.
In our opinion, none of this takes away from the excellent gameplay and top-notch writing, but it doesn't exactly seal the deal either. We would have liked to see DirectX 11 support with tessellation and maybe some high-quality ambient occlusion with soft shadows. It may be true that the game doesn't necessarily need it, but it would have made it a more compelling title for PC gaming and graphics enthusiasts with the latest video cards. There are some ways to improve image quality in this game, but you will have to take matters into your own hands and edit INI files to get the best quality. We are going to do this and give you all a follow-up later this week showing off some of the INI tweaks you can do to improve quality, and the effect on performance.
The Bottom Line
Overall, Skyrim is an impressive game. The combat is enjoyable, the writing is compelling, and the player's social and political decisions have real consequences that echo throughout the game. Its graphics aren't what we were hoping for, but it still looks good and in certain narrow spaces, is fairly demanding of the GPU.
Gamers looking to upgrade their video cards for Skyrim should look at NVIDIA's offerings. For high-end enthusiasts, the single and dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 solutions both rocked the game out of the park, and the GeForce GTX 570 was close behind. Gamers with a more modest budget should consider the GeForce GTX 560 Ti as a solid option for 24" and smaller monitors. Lacking real competition in the high-end space, the GeForce GTX 580 is still a high priced item. Newegg sells a nice Galaxy model for $439.99 USD after a $50 mail-in rebate through to December 31st. They are offering the same rebate on a GTX 570, bringing it down to $289.99 after the rebate. The GeForce GTX 560 Ti is eligible for a $35 mail-in rebate, also through the end of the year, bringing the cost on that down to$199.99 plus shipping.
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