Skyrim PC performance analyzed

If you’re anything like me, then you probably lost a good chunk of your life to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim this weekend. Bethesda’s latest iteration of the iconic RPG series has not disappointed, as is evident by its 96/100 Metacritic score.

But fans of the series will remember Oblivion well not only for its massive open world environments and other great features, but also for the manner in which it could reduce almost any gaming PC at the time to a chugging, stuttering pile of screws and metal.

It was considered at the time to be the most visually impressive game ever released, but the price was high, and very few gamers could actually enjoy it at its best.

Years have passed though, and the games industry is a different place now. When Oblivion was released publishers were still to a large degree focused on PC gaming. At launch it was a PC exclusive, which meant that Bethesda could make it super demanding. Skyrim, however, has been simultaneously released on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, which means that those with less powerful PCs shouldn’t have too much of a problem with it.

Skyrim runs on Bethesda’s new Creation Engine, which is based on the Gamebryo engine used in Oblivion as well as previous Fallout games. The engine is fairly impressive, but don’t expect the same leaps and bounds that Oblivion made when it comes to visuals.

The likes of The Witcher 2 and Battlefield 3 are clearly on the forefront of PC gaming graphics, and Skyrim is clearly a fair way behind them. Having said that, both Battlefield 3 and The Witcher 2 require expensive hardware to get the best visual performance. So where does that leave Skyrim?

My own personal experience with Skyrim has been very smooth. My AMD quad-core coupled with 8GB of RAM and a HD 6970 has no problem running the game at maximum detail settings on 1920×1200 at well over 40 frames per second.

In Toms Hardware’s in-depth performance analysis, the benchmark findings indicated that the game is heavily processor-limited. With a decent quad-core under the hood, those with a relatively inexpensive Radeon HD 6850 are able to play the game on ultra settings with 16 AF, 4x AA and 1920×1080. This is more than can be said for the likes of Battlefield 3 and The Witcher 2.

Things also look good for gamers with more modest machines, and benchmarks indicate that the likes of a 2.5+ GHz Phenom II coupled with a Radeon HD 5770 or GeForce GTX 550 Ti will also be able to run the game on high settings at 1920×1080 and maintain 40+ frames per second.

Even entry level gaming rigs packing the likes of the GeForce GT430 or Radeon HD5570 will be able to play the game comfortably on 1680×1050 on medium settings.

So it’s mostly good news then for PC gamers. However, if you own a dual graphics card setup, then you will be frustrated to learn that neither AMD nor Nvidia support SLI or Crossfire in Skyrim, although patches are in the works to rectify this situation.

Generally speaking, Skyrim has shed The Elder Scroll series’ long standing reputation for making games which are visually cutting edge and resource hungry, and delivered an experience which is far more accessible to gamers with less expensive hardware.