Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim PC Performance Review - PAGE 3

When The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was first released for the PC, there were issues related to the drivers that affected the CrossFireX performance along with flickering issues throughout the games environments. Over the last few weeks the issues have been partially addressed, as both Nvidia and AMD graphics cards now scale in multi-GPU configurations (though only marginally) and in our testing the flickering issue has gotten better, though it's not entirely gone.

Between the two camps, Skyrim run best on Nvidia graphics cards. Our internal testing showed that graphics cards such as the GTX 560Ti and GTX 570 did better than their AMD rivals across the board. However, the overall performance from both AMD and Nvidia was quite good, as even the HD 6790 was able to achieve a smooth frame rate when playing the game at medium settings. With results like this, Skyrim should be able to be enjoyed on most systems, even ones that don’t have a particularly strong graphics card. Of course for the best results with high settings, it is best to have a strong graphics card. For that, our minimum recommendation would be either an AMD HD 6870, or Nvidia GTX 560.

Skyrim tends to be CPU limited. Essentially, this means a strong processor will go a long way in improving the total frame rate. For anyone with a low-end processor, though, there are plenty of tweaking options which improve the performance, such as lowering the AA, limiting the viewing distance, and reducing the shadow quality -- more on that in our wiki. However, if you are not limited by either the CPU or GPU, a few mods which improve textures, add HD image quality and so on, can be found in our wiki guide.

Skyrim is one of those games that proves DirectX 11 is not the end all be all, as a finely polished DX9 game can look impressive. Still, we would have loved to seen the landscape, charters and cities of Skryim in DX11 and hope Bethesda does come out with a patch to improve the graphical fidelity further.