Hello! First time posting.

I was able to play the last two beta weekends and had an off thing occur. When I went to fiddle with the graphics settings, I could go no higher than 'medium' on the overall quality. That is to say, when I clicked the dropdown box to switch from medium to high or ultra high, neither were available. (The same sort of thing held true for other, more specific options.) Does anyone know why this would be?

I'm running a dual-core at 2.66ghz, 4gb ram, and a GeForce GTX 460. I know I don't meet the recommended requirements, but I do meet the minimum. The game played perfectly fine on medium settings. It's just weird that the higher options literally weren't there. Usually, when you're playing on a lower end system the higher options are there, but the game will just run like crap if you select them.

Here's my theory I'm hoping you can either confirm or deny. In order to avoid a long enough download time that I wouldn't have been able to actually play the game, I copied the game off a friends hard drive who has a much faster internet connection. He's running a quad-core processor, though. I'm wondering if maybe since the copy I was using was optimized for a quad-core/64-bit system and I was running it (with no other problems than the missing graphics options) on a dual-core/32-bit system, that that caused some sort of problem that resulted in what I've described? Or do you think it might be something else?

At any rate, it was just odd. I've never seen just plain missing graphics options rather than a system just not being able to perform under higher options. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks!

Sounds like your GPU cant handle "something" that is included in the high settings. Shaders or whatever.

Thanks for the quick reply. Do you think that would make the graphics option itself disappear? I've played higher end games on lower end systems before and the options were always available, the game just wouldn't run very well.

Hi Dheovan,

I have a dual core processor, 64 bit, 3 GHz, 8 GB memory and a GeForce GTX470, Windows 7 64 bit, and I can run ESO at Ultra-High.

Maybe the extra 4 GB memory is the big difference ?

Im not an expert but lets say your GPU supports shader 2.0 and "high settings" means the game will run with shader 3.0.

It would make sense for the option to be grayed out.

edit. pulling shaders off my ass, as i told you im not an expert lol

I'm running two gtx 450's with a amd 955 clocked to 4.2ghz 8gig ram, win 7 64bit and I have all the options and the game runs fine.

All of this sounds promising. I still don't know if it would explain why the option literally isn't there rather than just grayed out or clickable but leading to not great gameplay. If I get the retail game and the problem is still there, I'll just contact customer support and see what they say. If I need to upgrade a few components, well, it's about time for that anyways. Thanks all.

If you are using 32bit system, you can't enable max settings.

WarriorKeKe, where did you find that information? I'm having trouble finding any place talking about the limitations of 32-bit systems.

It may be a limitation imposed by 32-bit hardware generally, or it could be related to the OS/DirectX version. Are you running Win XP? If so, DX9 might not support something that the game would want to use at higher settings.

Im using a GTS250 and had most settings on high. Id have to boot my system back up to see what settings, if any, arent available.

To clarify, it defaulted to high. I turned off shadows, bloom lighting and specularity.

Shadows are the biggest performance hit anywhere and I turn them off in most games as a force of habit.

Specular lighting and bloom often produce effects that give me a headache.

The games lighting giving me halos at certain angles, while pretty, hurt my eyes as it is.

Edit: win7 x64.

I'm running Vista with DX11. Everything is up to date. I'm trying to figure out how 32-bit might affect it. I may just need to give them a call, ha.

Actually shadows are usually GPU driven and not CPU driven. But tbh that depends on the way the game is optimized.

If you can't see them then it can't handle it, so it's blank? Sort of auto detect. You said the game was running fine for you? I don't think you will get past med with that setup, mmos are CPU bound so the CPU is the weak link in any system for MMOs

Yep. The game ran smoothly. A bunch of the settings were set to high or ultra (the ones I had available), as well.

How strange. I'm on a laptop, so more than likely your rig is better than mine, but I still have access to all the graphics options. I suppose this is the one case where my video is useful haha: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHne9EFO5Xo

Since you say you copied the game from a friends computer. I'm going to work along the lines of what you were thinking. You could try going to your, My Documents/Elder Scrolls Online, Live, Folder. There is a file, UserSettingd.txt. Change the .txt to, say just .tx. Then run you Launcher, hit play to see if it makes a new UserSettings.TXT and then see if you can now access those greyed out options.

Opps just saw you're using Vista, I don't know if that file will be in the same place, but find it and try.

my case it started with the "high" graphic settings, but first night of that i kept getting blackscreen,

so shifting image quality down to "low", it worked like a charm- but much less fancy,

immah try to have medium/high graphic settings this weekend though.... the game is fancy.