Are you sure you read his card correctly?

"ATI Readon HD 5450"

From Tom's Hardware, his card's tier:
Discrete: 6600 GT, 6800LE, 6800 XT, 7300 GT (DDR2), 8500 GT, 9400 GT
Go (mobile): 7600 (128-bit)
Discrete: 9800 XT, X700 PRO, X800 GT, X800 SE, X1300 XT, X1600 PRO, HD 2400 XT, HD 4350, HD 4550, HD 5450

The PS3's GPU is 4 tiers on Tom's Hardware's chart above his, and yours is an additional four tiers! According to Tom's Hardware his card is some EIGHT tiers below yours on their chart, with three tiers on their chart representing a significant leap in power.

You have to remember that just because the generation of the card is high, the following numbers are the important part. It may be a newer generation card, but it's a very low end one!

Check this out. Your card vs. his:
http://www.hwcompare.com/458/geforce-8800-gt-512mb-vs-radeon-hd-5450/

Now the 8500GT could run Oblivion with graphics turned down... but his card is WAY WAY WAY less powerful than yours, and less powerful than the console hardware.

Edit:
I forgot to post this, here's the Tom's Hardware chart:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-graphics-card-game-performance-radeon-hd-6670,2935-7.html

Oh, I guess you have a point. I have to admit I'm not all that familiar with ATI cards these days. So yes, that card might be a problem. He should be OK on Medium settings though, with maybe some stuttering. From what I've read that's roughly equivalent to what the consoles will be getting. Mind you, that is a DX11 card and it's been confirmed that Skyrim will support the performance features of that format, so that might balance things out a bit. I'm not really sure how much of a difference that will make overall. But I don't see much past Medium regardless.

NOT getting 8gb of RAM these days is downright silly. I can get 8gb of really good RAM for $90, less if I poke around a bit.
This is what I can do with 4gb of RAM: Load Windows, load firefox, xchat, winamp and have less than 1.5gb leftover for gaming. No thank you.

Are you a troll?
1GB is okay, let alone 2GB.
Dual core is fine, will run max no problems.
There is no need for a 1TB hard drive

wow lol.

Edit : @above post

What the hell are you on about?

The fact that those programs take up 2.5GB ram is total bullcrap.

I'm running 6GB on my rig and only 200mb of stuff is in my processes tab.
In my opinion, 4GB is ideal for gaming, 6GB is all that you will need, 8GB+ Is just for the hell of it or lots of C.A.D work etc.

I agree there I have 8GB as well and I wouldn't use any less, although whether it's even useful also depends on your OS. Any more than 4GB on a 32 bit version of windows is useless IIRC.

Until a new console comes out, any decent computer from the past 5 years can run any game that is released. Technically. The biggest block would be Direct X 10 or higher requirements which most people don't have.


How is it silly? No single program, or any normal combination of programs can EVER fill 4GB. Under no normal circumstance would you be doing heavy rendering and editing at the same time. At best most people are playing a game and have perhaps a music player running and a browser with a few tabs.

More is better, yes, but silly not to have 8GB is just pure ignorance to standard PC usage.


2GB minimum, 4GB for gamers minimum. More is obviously better, so if you can get more, then there is no downside, but realistically, no one ever needs more then 4GB given the 32-bit application limitation and the likelyhood of running more then one program that can cap that at the same time is dirt slim.

As for a TB hard drive, it is heavily dependant on what you need. I have a TB drive that only has 183GB free because I rip movies to my computer for backup and have over 60 games installed.

Yeah, 4GB seems like plenty - 2GB for modern resource-hog OS's to play around in, and another 2GB to give your games plenty of legroom.

Only need more if you're doing something silly like running 5 copies of WoW on one computer.

Exactly agree with you belanos, it makes you laugh how people guess what the requirements are, i personnaly think 4gb ram would be plenty for that and any other game out atm. The hard drive size barely matters, aslong as you have about 10gb free to install. I have 6gb ram, but mainly down to using photoshop etc. Aswell as games. I am also looking to install a ssd as my boot drive then have my 640gb hdd as my storage etc, on a laptop too. I could even install up to 16GB of ram but i wont because i wont use it.

Curiously, one of the upgrades I'm sure I'll notice the most in my new rig is a change from a HDD drive to a SSD one. Non-mobile parts and a 5x bandwitch increase http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jsHpNkDQn0.

I mean, load times reduced from 9 minutes to 1....

Don't listen to the people who think you will need a super computer for Skyrim, I can almost guarantee that it will not be much more graphically taxing than Oblivion.
You may be able to run 1280x1024 on full settings with your current rig, but I would consider just getting another gig of ram just to be sure.

Yeah im thinking of adding a ssd and then use it as my boot drive and for games etc.

Different engine so it could mean different specs. Don't forget Todd said they were able to use the 360 in different ways they couldn't before. So with the new engine, the requirements can be higher this time.

Only time will tell. I agree get at least minimum 4 gigs of Ram.

I currently have a 250 gb HDD, and I've never used it up completely, so an equivalent single SSD will fit me just fine. No need for a massive HDD storage by now.

I deal in the truth. He asked for a system that could run it on max, so I specced him one that can be built for less than $1,000 (it can, try it for yourself at Newegg or NCIX). I cannot make any guesses as to what the game will require, but I made some rather straightforward educated guesses based on games that have come out in the past while, such as Metro 2033. I've seen lots of bad advice in this thread, such as Mister "1gb of RAM for gaming", and other people thinking it'll have the same requirements as Oblivion, but do you really think a game that's actually going to be CPU intensive (unlike Oblivion), will need the same hardware as Oblivion? That would be a poor effort on Bethesda's part and a very big letdown for the entire community if it ran on the same hardware from 5 years ago.

To furthur explain my choices:
Why a 4 core CPU? Because you can't really buy a 2 core CPU anymore except for bargin bin ones that cost about $20 less than a 4 core one that out performs it in every way

Why 8gb of RAM? Windows 7 x64 will need 2gb just for itself after you have your various programs (uTorrent, Steam, MSN, A/V, etc.) installed and set up. Add 300-600mb for firefox, if you use it. We're at 2.6gb right there already. Add another 2gb for the game (I'm assuming it'll use its entire address space which shouldn't be TOO surprising, Oblivion could get up to 1.3gb at times, which is quite a bit for a 5 year old game). Now we're at 4.6gb. I'd go with 6gb on a motherboard with triple channel (3x2gb sticks) and 8gb on a dual channel board (2x4gb). Another reason to have 6-8gb of RAM on a Windows 7 system: Superfetch. Your programs will load blindingly quicker with all that extra RAM being used as caching. Additionally you will have very little (or quite likely, no) page file usage, furthur speeding up programs and games.

Why a 1TB HDD? Hard Drives are pennies a gigabyte and it's cheaper to buy a 1TB hard drive now than to buy a 500gb HDD and then have to buy another one next year. To those saying you'll never need a 1TB HDD: my 1.5TB game library disagrees with you.

In terms of video cards, by October the mid-range video cards will be good for the game, and depending on resolution quite likely adequate for High or Max graphics. For video cards, I'd say anything equal to or better than a Radeon 6870 will be good if not great for Skyrim. More guessing? Sure, but it's guessing based in fact.

Ram speed is important if you overclock as it will usually also increase the clock rate against ram. However faster ram has almost no effect on real world performance.
Few games demand lots of ram, Internet Explorer demand more, some heavy duty programs like Photoshop and Poser benefit from 8GB.
Except for this the only benefit is that you can have many programs running at once and that free ram is used for disk cache.