I played TES 3 & 4 on consoles, for Skyrim i think i'll try it on PC, since i plan to buy a new computer this year.

Just want to know which company has better support for TES series? I heard Oblivion runs better with Radeons, which one do you think is better for Skyrim?


this rig，any thoughts?


Intel? CoreTM i7 930

Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit

8GB Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz

1TB - 7200RPM, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 16MB Cache

MSI N560GTX-TI Twin Frozr II/OC

ASUS VH238H Black 23" Full HD HDMI LED Backlight LCD Monitor


a Dell XPS 9100's 525W PSU is it enough?

You'll get pretty much equal performance with equal cards. AMD versus nVidia is pretty much personal preference these days, same with Intel versus AMD.

That being said, if you go with Intel, you'll get better performance out of an nVidia card, and if you go with AMD better performance from an AMD card. It's just how it is. If you go Intel, you get nVidia, AMD you get AMD.

I prefer nVidia's drivers, but I don't think there's much between the two nowadays.

Yeah they are the same thing, I prefer Nvidia personally.

... Not this again.
How the hell can we know anything about PC requirements of what kind of graphics card that runs best?
We know NOTHING about how the game runs! NOTHING!

We can't even speculate about it because we know so little about it!
So all of these threads are really really useless!
You just have to wait and see like everybody else until devs or videos or interviews tell us the answers! Until then, thread like this one is completely useless.

Sorry if I came out as harsch but it's true and I wanted to emphasize that because I'm tired of seeing threads like these. They serve no purpose and you will never be able to get much out of them, since there's not even any room of knowledge for speculation.

^ That's true as well...

Considering that Skyrim's running on a different game engine, there's pretty much no frame of reference.

Just get whatever has the best price is basically the best policy. Only a fool would choose because of brand loyalty. Go with what works, what is reliable and what is the best priced value for YOU!.

Merc, not nessecarily. With certain chipsets some cards will perform like garbage compared to its competitor. Like, don't even bother putting an nVidia card in any AMD CPU motherboard unless it's a SLi board.

I like Nvidia but I'm just hopelessly loyal.

It's true that Oblivion and Fallout 3 favoured AMD/ATI cards but Skyrim is made for the most part on a different engine so we don't know if this trend continues.

ive always had better luck with amd/ati (encase you didn't know amd bought ati) and as said match the GPU to the CPU the just run better that way.

i would have to say Nvidia, but i am a nvidian from my tnt 2 to my gtx 480

I played Oblivion on a 8800 nvidia card and I never felt any limitation, although my friend said it runs better on Ati. Even if it was a fact that Skyrim runs better on Ati I'd still stick to nVidia, after all how much the difference can be?

AMD+Ati, they're cheaper and AMD is considerably faster than Intel on its lower-middle class CPUs.

And, I prefer the internal architecture of AMD, being a Computer Engineering student this makes a lot!

I would almost always go with an amd gpu.

If you want to use Linux now and then, go for nVidia.
Also, if you want to use tessellation (we don't know yet if Skyrim will make use of it), nVidia would be the better choice at the moment.
Just going by the brand won't help you, though - they have their pros and cons, and each generation has to be re-evaluated. I always had ATI, but I might switch to nVidia for my next card because the games I currently play are optimized for nVidia cards and I like the performance and design of the latest generation.

In the end, what you'll have to look out for is the power consumption and if the card will actually fit into your casing.

I've been looking up this stuff for a couple weeks now and this is the only place I saw anyone so vehemently claim you need to match the GPU brand with the CPU brand. Everywhere else I've seen suggest it doesn't matter at all.

Of the cards currently out for the mid-high end (still pretty expensive) the nVidia GTX 560 Ti looks to be what I'm looking at for the future, if it goes down in price. The reviews I searched for unanimously supported the nVidia card at that tier. It's not that big of a difference though. I'm not a big fan of blowing 300+ dollars by putting a power hungry scorching hot monstrosity into a computer. The one time I spent $400 on a graphics card it broke after two years and PNY wouldn't honor the warranty. Never buying from them again.

ok, so I am using an AMD CPU and an nVidia card.
There are no issues, everything is playing fine and looks great,
but are you saying that it would be better somehow with a Radeon card?
Is there a big difference between AMD and ATI Radeons?
This gtx 460 card is known to run very cool also.

The first PC I ever built was an AMD T-Bird & 3Dfx Voodoo GPU. Back then, AMD was better for gaming. CPUs have evolved so much since then, and AMD's quality went down for a long while. So about 4 years ago I started using Intel. As for GPU, I prefer stability and support of Nvidia GPUs.

That's because you DON'T have to match it like that. The graphics card will work on chipsets from either company just the same.

There is no real difference between ATI and nVidia, in my opinion nVidia has historically been better at making drivers and very top end (above even gamer spec) graphics cards but when you get into the PC level cards, there really isn't that much difference. ATI has been a bit better at DirectX while nVidia handles OpenGL far better then ATI but such things are open to change and there will be new graphics cards released by the time Skyrim comes out and so it's pointless to argue about it now, unless you were trying to build a PC for it now which isn't that advisable because we have no idea what specs are recommended yet.

I just go for which ever one is the best in the market at the time.

Sort of. You can have an Intel motherboard/cpu with either an AMD GPU or an Nvidia GPU. Or 2 AMD GPUs in Crossfire or 2 Nvidia GPUs in SLI.

However if you have an AMD motherboard/CPU usually you can only have 1 Nvidia card. (unless you have an Nvidia chipset on the motherboard)

This is false. Completely false. No one listen to him about anything.


No, you will not get better performance unless the card you get provides better performance than what you currently have. You do not need to match brands.
ATI was a company that made video cards branded Radeon. AMD bought them and eventually dropped the ATI name. They are the same company.

I never had a problem with radeon cards. They typically use less power and run cooler while performing about the same. Nvidia I think has recently tried to make their cards more efficient though, so that might not be the case today.