Multicore support is a default thing seeing as the consoles use multicores; now >2gb ram we can mod that in the thing we cannot mod in is DX11 suport, if they just had some basic support for it in THAT I WOULD LOVE. Then we can push it the rest of the way by modding in lighting effects, tesselation. OH and we can redo the spells, effects, water, armor, weapons, clothing, terrain, building, distant buildings/terrain with glorious DX11 effects


Also tesselation using a dx11 card barely hits performance.

I just hope they add proper motion blur, depth of field, godrays and all that stuff, since all new games don't even have those. DX11 features would be a plus since I paid for a graphics card that can support them a year ago and I've played only two games where I get to use them.

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,698077/Unigine-Heaven-with-DirectX-11-Tessellation-Graphics-card-benchmarks-Top-article-of-October-2009/Practice/

Another example of tesselation on and off in the Heaven Benchmark. Time to upgrade to Dx11 people, if you have not done so already.

Agreed... and now imagine that being skyrim

Erm... You haven't seen the actual water in Skyrim either. Screenshots, maybe. The new trailer hardly shows "actual" water. The water flowing on the dungeon floor looks really nice, with good detail and specularity (Oblivion's water really lacked nice specular), but it's simply an animation just like the water rapids. The rapids still look pretty bad, IMO.

I can tell you from what I can gather in the trailer, there is nothing you can show to somehow prove that the MGE water is "terrible" compared to Skyrim. You can't even prove that Skyrim uses water that isn't just an animated normal map. In case you didn't notice, the MGE water has fully 3D waves, with full-on per vertex animations and everything. The poly counts needed for decent water with animated vertices is extremely high. Note that hardly any console games use this kind of water. The MGE water only got that good after years of hacking Morrowind and many hours of hard work. So to call it terrible is equally absurd and amusing. Mostly because there are many elements of MGE and OBGE which exceed their successors. MGE had full-on shadows before Oblivion did. We're currently working in OBGE to bring both better water and shadows to Oblivion as well. In fact we may have both better waters and shadows added to Oblivion before Skyrim comes out.

I myself have added much-improved underwater effects to Oblivion:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCoSw7hGAF8 (Video is pre-surface water shader replacement)

And with Tomerk's work on the actual water surface, it's even further improved:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8o4W6aRTxs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNrsDNuY1Q0

The last two are both extremely preliminary (I even have the videos unlisted), but in regards to the first video, I doubt even Skyrim will have added these niceties to Skyrim's water. So we're just going to have to hope for an "Extender" project just like MGE and OBGE before it.

From the brief glimpses of Skyrim's water in motion (1:27-1:28, 1:43-1:44), it appears to me to still be a 2D plane with an animated normal map. I don't know how you can say that well-implemented 3D water is "terrible" compared to well-implemented 2D water. Water isn't 2D! The screenshots also show a lack of full reflection LOD, as in Oblivion, where you had to turn on the extra reflections in the INI file.

But the fact still remains... You can't make any comparison to the MGE water (which is nicer than 90% of games' water) and Skyrim's water which we haven't seen at any kind of length and in any kind suitable level of fidelity to make a comparison fair. There is simply no basis for comparison.

Well the shogun 2 demo just came out, then the witcher 2 is coming soon, BF3 in the fall, Crysis 2 coming up soon.

DX11 and tessellation can be switched off if your PC cant run them.

I would like to have DX11 and Tesseallation in TES5, I think my SLI GTX 560s could just about handle it lol.

A slider system for tessellation would be perfect, slide it up and everything becomes too bumpy. A single 5870/5890 would probably be about 40fps with it maxxed, a single geforce 580 would easily do 60fps. (i have a 5870)

However put the slider down a bit and even the weaker dx11 cards will get a fantastic gain while pushing 60fps. This is assuming the game is optimized. Which I kind of believe it will be.


I really hope, that todd howard has at least.... had some information passed to him, even if he never visits these forums, that people want tessellation. It's the best thing about dx10 or dx11. Object Motion Blur coming in second place if you ask me, but that can be done in dx9.

I hope at least he chooses to not include tessellation while being informed that people want it passionately. Nobody is arguing he makes the best games, (him and the entire bethesda team, mind you, they are just as important)



There is absolutely no question in my mind that tessellation won't be included.


This is my guesswork.


Chance of tessellation being included on pc: 0.07%
Chance of direct x 11 shadows being included: 15%
Chance of dx9 being the only thing we get: 85.03%

The difference us begging will make: 0.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00%

Well, with ATI you're in luck, because they cap the Tessellation Factor anyway. This is to offset ATI/AMD's worse performance in regard to tessellation. You can turn this on/off in the latest drivers. I don't know if it's on by default or off.

You know separate chances don't have to add up to 100%, right? And that they add up to 100.1% anyway? :tongue:

DirectX 11 shadows doesn't really mean much when you say just that. You probably mean something PCSS (Percentage Closer Soft Shadows) which I don't even think necessarily requires DX11. Other soft shadow methods with more accurate penumbras are a bit expensive to do. PCSS is even pretty expensive. I would say there is a much higher chance that they include similar INI options as in Oblivion. Shadow map resolution, shadow map filtering off/low/high, etc.

If they don't include a shadow map resolution variable I will be very sad. There is some pretty extreme aliasing, because the scene seems to share one shadow map, unlike Oblivion where each object gets one. And as I've said elsewhere, they don't even look to be using Cascaded Shadow Mapping, which puts higher shadow detail nearer to the camera. It's a shadow LOD system, basically. Just like tessellation is a mesh LOD system. There are better options than CSM, even, like Intel's amazing SDSM (Sample Distribution).

NO...NO it doesn't. It lowers the performance hit *EDIT: while maintaining high fidelity*, makes games run smoother at least DX11 tessellation.

/face to palm

The thing to remember is that's it's flowing dynamically based on physics (according to interviews and previews). Drop an object into it, and the water will automatically flow around it, add a downward slope, and it will automatically flow downwards (hopefully with appropriate speed based on the angle), or let it run off a cliff, and it will turn into a waterfall. In Oblivion and Morrowind, you couldn't even slope water, in Morrowind you only had one water level for the whole world, in Oblivion one water level per cell (and the only way to do waterfalls was with static meshes that borded between two cells; flowing water was also done with static meshes).