nvm.

Size is fine. This is still current gen...

Should be able to run it on medium settings. After some performance mods come out, maybe even higher. Good news. :celebration:

Beth is so much better than other so called pc friendly developers.

Don't understand the problem. "Any DX9 card with 512mb of VRAM will run it". Seems pretty straightforward.

(It's the 512 that makes my old system no good..... I've run all the previous games quite well with a "crap" card. An underclocked, mobile, HD 2600XT w/256mb vram. It was enough to get low-mid settings out of Oblivion, Fallout 3, and FO:NV. So when they say that any 512mb DX9 card is good enough, I believe it. Yeah, there might be one or two old GPU models out there with 512mb and a weaker chip, but they'd have to be pretty rare.)

There is a separate thread better suited for defining differences between what is or isn't CRAP. If Intel produced it, that's basic crap for video. If it was produced for business it was named / numbered 100, 200, 300, 400, and 05, 10, 15, 20. Makes no difference if it has a GB of attached RAM, it's not good enough to use more than 128 because of its 64-bit bandwidth. Game-capable graphics are 600s and upward, with the "Enthusiast" Level taking over at 800 and upward. For Geforces, the numbers don't count as much as the prefixes: GTS means game-capable, and GTX means either the upper end of gaming, or High End enthusiast.

There are also some "budget" cards priced below actual game cards, and numbered HD 5570, HD 6570, GT 220, GT 440.

Game-capable cards will have 128 bit memory systems that work most of the time with 256 MBs of RAM, but also fairly often, but not constantly, with 512 MBs. No matter how much you attach, the Low End won't reach even 256 MBs' worth of VRAM. Depending on the core speed and RAM speed, the budget cards won't use 512 MBs at all often. The middle of the range will access that much "often", and the upper end of the range will be fast enough to deal with 512 MBs frequently. If that's what Bethesda means, then they should have SAID so.

Enthusiast cards start out being 256 bit memory cards, which start out always able to run 512 MBs, and very frequently able to go on up to a full GB of VRAM, but it's the combination of performance features involved that make them powerful and expensive, not just that they may have quite a lot of RAM attached.

I asked in the last thread but nobody answered me

I have a laptop with these specs:

Windows 7 64-bit
Nvidia 9800M GS (512 MB)
4GB RAM
Intel Core 2 Duo P7450 2.13GHz

How well will I run it? I maxed Oblivion, play Crysis on high, Deus Ex HR on high, SC2 on high...

You want THIS thread for that purpose:

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1246511-official-will-my-pc-run-skyrim-thread-42-w-hardware-guide/

Incidentally, for the kibitzer unable to handle my previous revelation about the terrible graphics with 512 MBs attached, here's an entire PAGE's worth of total crap video with 512 MBs of cheap, worthless RAM attached to them! None of these are any good for gaming, but the Geforce 210s and 8400 GSes are the very worst of all.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007709+600007777&QksAutoSuggestion=&ShowDeactivatedMark=False&Configurator=&IsNodeId=1&Subcategory=48&description=&hisInDesc=&Ntk=&CFG=&SpeTabStoreType=&AdvancedSearch=1&srchInDesc=



It doesn't look even "slightly" rare to me! Not at all.

When this silly version of a "Minimum" is sorted by "Can You Run It's" resident morons, the worst advice ever (practically) will be the result.

For everyone's edification, I just looked up the first twenty makes and models of graphics cards that Newegg is selling with a full GB of VRAM attached. The worst of all were the Geforce 210s, seven of those. Almost as bad as those, they listed seven Geforce 8400 GS cards. AMD's worst, the HD 5450, is better than an 8400 GS by a long ways, but still isn't much good, and IMO, won't be worth spit trying to run Skyrim, no matter what amount of VRAM is on it. A Terbyte wouldn't make any difference. None of the three models can do anything with any more than 128 MBs of RAM in a gaming environment, because they only have 64 bits of Memory System bandwidth.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007709+600007779&QksAutoSuggestion=&ShowDeactivatedMark=False&Configurator=&IsNodeId=1&Subcategory=48&description=&hisInDesc=&Ntk=&CFG=&SpeTabStoreType=&AdvancedSearch=1&srchInDesc=

I see people talking as if the GT 220 can't play games and yet I've seen it run plenty of games just fine. Granted they are not new games, but to say it was never a gaming card is quite wrong. It's lower end for sure, but if it's junk it's only junk for fairly recent games. There are far less capable cards than that.

Yes, you're right.

The Riva 128 is far less capable then the GT 220. Therefore, the GT 220 is fantastic and will be able to run not only Skyrim on ultra with 100fps +, it can also systematically make voxels actually work.

Your sarcasm does not work in this case. The GT 220 is certainly weak by modern standards but it's more bottom of the spectrum than "not a gaming card."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPfcmNaJHAs

The "Budget" card series that began with the 8500 GT, rises out of the choice nVIDIA believed it had to make, to continue to add complexity (and size) to the High End GPUs, while ATI stopped doing so. When ATI was able to set a retail price to sell Radeon HD 3650s for about $55, nVIDIA had to get $80 for the Geforce 8600 GT. The 8500 GT was designed to sell for $45, less than ATI could sell its HD 3650 for. ATI responded with an HD 3470 or 3490, but it was too little, too late.

From the following generation, AMD offered the HD 4550, which fell below the 220 GT when it came along to replace the 9400 GT (8500 with another name). AMD finally had the HD 5570 for the fence-sitting zone between Low End and Medium. However, by the time nVIDIA reached the 500s, they had diluted the "GT" with so much borderline stuff, that "GTS" is the only certain thing to look for to be certain of getting at least a real Medium Geforce.

I was thinking about the comments above while caught in traffic on the way home just now, and thought it wouldn't hurt at all to expand just slightly. Cards similar to the 8500 GT and GT 220 were only new in the sense that both AMD and nVIDIA kept on developing them. Several years ago, before current very thin media for chips brought the cost of medium size chips, such as the average GPU, way down in cost, both companies had designed a "Low End" product that actually was very close to being Medium, and cost so comparatively much to produce that the cards had to be priced considerably higher than the equivalent cards had been the year before.

The Geforce 7300 GT and the Radeon X1300 Pro were quite close in performance to the 7600 GS and the X1600 Pro cards, but were roughly twice as high in cost as the X300 and the Geforce 6200. Both companies eventually did something very similar, to have a really Low-Ball choice. The Radeon X300 was recycled as the X1050, and the 6200 was reissued as a 7200. The X1300 ended up "stealing" sales from the X1600, which was replaced by the X1650 Pro. Both companies chose to leave the bottom end where it was, hardly moving the performance of the 7300 GS to produce the 8400 GS, and pushing the 7300 GT upward to 8500 status (not really the same card, but similar in performance).

ATI was still running its own show, and the HD 2400 Pro was a different card than the X1300 Pro, without any really measureable performance difference, and the HD 3450 continued that trend. I've already commented about the 8500 GT becoming the 9400 GT. The 8400 GS and 9300 GS did the same, although very few, if any, of the 9300 GS ever showed up for desktops, only for laptops (for the most part, the 9300 number was reserved for IGPs).

My best guess now is that, just the way Bethesda had its head in the sand before releasing Oblivion, they are about to use the current nonsense as the so-called "Official Minimum Requirement" when it is still literally meaningless.

Still don't understand why you're so worked up about this. I've seen plenty of games where the min reqs were something along the lines of "256mb video card with Shader Model 3". Ok, sure, the "shader model 3" is a bit more info. But at this point, it doesn't seem a stretch to assume that "512mb DX9 GPU" covers that. In 98% of cases. :shrug:

(And honestly? The people who don't realize their GPU isn't strong enough, because they bought some $300 Dell from Best Buy? They don't understand how to read the reqs in the first place, or they wouldn't have expected to play games on their bargain box.)

The fact that you do not realize how deceptive the minimum actually is just helps prove my point. I know that a Geforce 210 is just crap, a bad card that gets no better at all with more VRAM hanging on it, and yet there are tens pf thousands of the stupid things on shelves around the world for $40 and less, with 512 and 1024 MBs of RAM. They won't play games correctly, and yet they meet the stated minimum.

Six years ago, Bethesda's official TES4 minimum was equally useless because nVIDIA lied to everyone about the FXes and Low End 6n00s, and the ignorant Bethesda people took them at their word, without even a single thought, or any testing worth the definition of that word.

Actually, I had overlooked an additional error that is potentially as ignorant as the graphics foolishness. There is an immense difference between an AMD X2 dual core processor and a terrible Pentium P4D, but the Official Minimum doesn't even make that distinction.

Didn't someone ask Pete if the PC version would have a lower graphics option when compared to the 360 version and he said no?

Are minimum specs going to get us playing the 360 quality version of the game?

Anyone know? Or will it be like Oblivion where the resolution is so low, and there aren't any shadows, that you might as well be playing a 64 game lol

I really don't know how he can make that claim. The 360 probably uses the lowest texture resolution but there's a lot of other factors to consider. At the very least we should be able to turn shadows off which would certainly be a lower setting than the 360. Then there's stuff like screen resolution, draw distance, actor distance. Either Pete's wrong or they really dropped the ball on LOD settings.

Given the current so-ignorant version of what "Minimum" amounts to, there's really no way to be certain. Some of us think it's just another instance of Bethesda being really anti-tech in their hiring policies, preferring ignorant clowns to educated geeks.

I'm hoping for this.. I'm hoping being able to run NV will allow me to run Skyrim... I realize they are different games.. but hopefully BGS' new engine is optimized and awesome enough to where my system doesn't sputter all the time. (NV being as buggy as it was for a lot of people on Steam had almost no issues for me..)

I visited the Game-o-Meter for the YouGamers web site, and saw that they have named a particular Intel Core Duo as the minimum, instead of the meaningless nonspecific that Bethesda left us with:

http://www.yougamers.com/gameometer/10496/

Haven't used this website in awhile, but I love how my system maxes out every category

Can't wait to see Skyrim maxed out on ultra.

I was just using Google to see if it could find anywhere other than YouGamers and those other idiots to run an automatic check and tell you whether your PC passed. Microsoft had such a function, but strictly limited to their own games. It was very accurate for those. EA had a poor version, easily as bad as the moronic one that gets the most exposure. EA's wasn't even accurate for all of the games that they distributed. I didn't find anywhere new, and neither EA's nor Microsoft's functions showed up in the first couple of pages of Googled hits.

Retailers everywhere seem to have broken the release date early, and never a word that Bethesda was finally any less stupid this time about correcting their nonsensical proposed system requirements than they were six years ago when they announced an equally ignorant set of requirements for Oblivion.

It's past time already for a separate Tech Forum. The complaints are going to start really piling up soon.