As for tweaks, SegmentNext has put together a fairly in-depth guide on how to increase performance, so we recommend you check that out as well. Skyrim Nexus is a great place to start as well as our sister site FilePlanet. improving depth of field, how many times the game will auto-save, etc.): bDoDepthOfField=1 bShowFloatingQuestMarkers=1 bShowQuestMarkers=1 bShowCompass=1 bMouseAcceleration=1 (recommended setting is 0 for better mouse movement) fAutosaveEveryXMins=15.0000 Under "" there are two commands you need to change to a value of 1: bTreesReceiveShadows=1 bDrawLandShadows=1 There's some other variables that you can adjust as well and they're fairly descriptive as to what each one will do (i.e. These instructions will allow you to improve the look and shadows of trees and some land objects by allowing them to receive shadows. You won't have to look far: it's located in the same Skyrim directory and remember to make a copy of it first before you start modifying it. Improve Shadows on Trees and Land Open the SkyrimPrefs.ini. To do this go to the part of the Skyrim.ini that says "." Copy "iPresentInterval=0" (minus the quotes) to the very bottom of the. Fixing Mouse Lag If your experiencing mouse lag you'll want to disable vsync - this isn't included in the game options. ini file by opening it in Notepad (as seen in the screenshot above). You can find the Skyrim.ini file in Documents -> My Games -> Skyrim. This involves modifying the Skyrim.ini file, so make sure you make a copy of it first in case you wind up breaking something. GameSpy fan, wazups-2x, has provided some other nice tweaks in our comments and we've re-purposed his contributions here. You can reduce the quality of the effect if you want to improve combat performance, especially if you're noticing some slowdown. Well, that's Radial Blur, designed to give the effect of you becoming disoriented when you're getting knocked around by an enemy. When you are hit in combat you'll see your screen blur slightly. This can vary depending on your rig of course, so see which setting works best for you. Overall it's not a huge gain but we'll continue to play the game with FXAA on instead of using anti-aliasing. Ultra Settings, FXAA Off, 8 Sample Anti-aliasing On Using the exact same setup and settings, we then set anti-aliasing to 8 samples and then turned off FXAA and came away with an average framerate of 35.216 (min: 18, max: 46). Ultra Settings, FXAA On, 8 Sample Anti-aliasing Off We completely turned off anti-aliasing and turned on FXAA, then ran around the open world of Skyrim for about a minute and came away with an average framerate of 41.6 (min: 21, max: 64). The rig that we ran this test on is a decidedly mid-range machine powered by a AMD Phenom II 1055T 2.8 GHZ processor, 6 GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA GTX 460 786 MB GPU with a resolution set to 1920 x 1080 at Skyrim's ultra settings. How We Tested To see if there really was a difference, we used a copy of FRAPS for benchmarking and then had AA and FXAA settings battle it out. FXAA is kind of the same thing, except its performance hit to your machine tends to be minimal with comparable quality to playing with anti-aliasing turned on. Typically, if you turn AA off you'll increase performance at the risk of running into a whole bunch of jagged texture images.
If you've been PC gaming for awhile, you've no doubt run into anti-aliasing options in the past. This stands for Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing. Experiment with it for awhile to find a viewpoint that suits you. While in-game, press the '~' key and then type "FOV=XX" minus the quotes with XX denoting the FOV number you wish to enter. If you want to see more of your character's hands and weapons, you'll want to follow these instructions (we found 80 to 85 to be a good range). In this case, it's the field of view from the perspective of your playable character. In case you're not in the "know," FOV is your field of vision. In order to assign an object to your right hand, you must press Shift + number key.Īccording to reddit this is a fairly simple five step process that both IGN and Rock, Paper, Shotgunhave talked about as well. That's it!īut what if you want to assign these objects to a specific hand? By default the above description will only hotkey something to your left. Now press a number key on to assign that object. While in-game open your Favorites (Q) and highlight an object name. First, assign a weapon, item, or spell to your Favorites. GameSpy fan, KronicCusador, figured this out in a matter of minutes.