I have a question about video quality for Skyrim. Does the game look better overall with lower video quality, but a higher resolution or with the highest video settings, but a lower resolution? (such as 1280x720 instead of 1920x1080)

Thanks for replies!

With Digital Monitors (unlike CRTs), the best look comes from the Native Resolution. Anything off of that will look stretched or pixelated or muddy or whatever no matter how much eye candy you throw at it.

Okay thanks so much. Mine does looks muddy so I'll check on that!

There are Texture Replacers out there that can and do improve the look of the game. Just know that some of them can cause drops in frame rates, so proceed carefully when adding them. And, use a Mod Manager so you can uninstall a Texture mod if you decide you don't like it.

Wait i just checked my resolution options and there is no native. Only thing that shows up is if i click show all resolutions and it says [Letterbox]

Native means the resolution of your monitor. Usually on a 20 inch to 27 inch, this is 1920 by 1080. Smaller and larger monitors it can be different.

Letterboxing refers to some folks having a 16:10 monitor and are playing a 16:9 game, or vice versa, and the letter box stops the stretching to fill the screen with an Aspect Ratio mismatch or is sometimes needed when sending the signal to a TV rather than a PC Monitor.

So, the first step is to figure out the resolution of your monitor, then set the game to that resolution.

Well when i run it on ultra with my computer's res, i experience frame drops, so should i lower video quality and continue to run on 1920x1080?

heres my computer specifications (I have a 1920x1080 monitor):

• Intel Core i7 4500U (1.80GHz)
• 8GB Memory 1TB HDD
• NVIDIA GeForce GT 745M
• Touchscreen
• 1920 x 1080
• Windows 8 64-bit

I'm not particulary familiar with laptop hardware (mainly because I consider them bad choices for gaming regardless of hardware) but according to one article GT 745M should be almost equal to GT 650/660M which are enough for high settings, if not even more. How much VRAM does it have? Skyrim can and will eat plenty of VRAM.

Rest of hardware is more than enough for ultra settings.

I did some tweaking and I'm able to run it flawlessly at 1920x1080 with reduced AA to 2 samples. Thanks for the help though!

I'd remove AA completely and I also recommend reducing shadow quality. The latter one particulary tends to worsen the performance.

Okay i did just to be safe in higher demanding climates. Thanks!