I clicked the first link listed and I am looking at it. Will any of this benefit an AMD user?

Well, now it's "BLANK" again. I have yet to see it so I couldn't tell you.

Most of the tweaks have nothing to do with a particular GPU architecture, they're about getting better quality or performance from any card. Things like the ugrid settings, AA, FXAA, etc. I think there were 1-2 pages about NVIDIA, but most of the guide is architecture neutral. There were great screenshot comparisons of all of the settings, too.

There are a couple of pages at the end for ini, tweaks, such as how to change your map settings, etc. I've seen nearly all of the settings he talks about before, but he explains everything very well, has a lot of screenshot comparisons, and IIRC has benchmarks comparing the effect of different settings.

It's definitely worth reading through when it's back up.

BTW, semi-interesting trivia: I've been holding back on modding the game, but over the last couple of days started using SKSE, a fair number of textures, and then reconfigured the ini using the tweak guide. I started getting frequent CTDs, and the purple texture issue. I'm wondering if reconfiguring the ini is a large part of the CTDs that everyone talks about (I've had a few before, but much less often). So then I installed the 4GB Skyrim mod, and now the game looks better than ever and is stable again.

I love this guy.

Its up now even tho his site says it isn't yet. Thanks.

I agree here. For example I gained 10fps with INI shadow tweaks from the nexus. Nothing like that is included in this guide, just what each graphic option does.

It also contains loads of different opinions which are claimed as facts. For example, "Don't use FXAA unless you have a low end PC, it makes things blurry" is one of them. I adore FXAA even on my high-end PC, and it doesn't blur, it just aliases parts of the textures more than AA does. Also stuff like "Never reduce your object slider lower than 7", stuff about shadows etc.

I read his Oblivion Tweak Guide, and immediately wrote him off as a bad source. Nothing he puts in those guides is remotely useful to me as its all stuff that I figure out within the first week of gameplay now, either from personal research of from forums for the people who actually play the game and try to get the absolute best out of it. Whatever advice he gives, I do not ever follow it anymore, and Skyrim has devolved into mostly FPS comparisons for game launcher settings. Here's a tip: Higher graphics settings = lower FPS. Not hard. I don't need 10 pages of bar graphs to tell me that.

Good hell, is Geforce.com always so wishy washy about posting their content? It's there, it's gone, it's there, it's gone, yadda yadda yadda...... I just read the whole guide, pretty generic but would probably be useful for someone who is new to tweaking a game and does not understand what each of the settings actually do.

Anyhow, the guide has been taken down again. What the hell? probably the most flaky website I've ever seen, they really ought to make up their mind and either post it, or don't. Ridiculous.

So true, I stopped reading his guides awhile ago since they turned into just a comparison of the in-game sliders or config wizards, which generally tell you increasing bah bah will decrease performance. Also he lets some of his guides get out of date, not usually from patches, but as new information arises about the "tweaks".

The biggest benefit to his guides is that he explains the basic concepts really well, which is important for people that aren't comfortable editing .ini files. He's also pretty honest about fps losses and recommends starting with a stable windows installation above all else. It's pretty basic advice but a lot of people don't follow it because they don't know better or they are looking for some sort of "magic bullet" that will increase performance.

It's also nice comparison screens. This is important, because it's a bit of a pain to do it yourself with so many settings.

Tweakguides.com guide still isn't up. He even said on his site it delayed.

Back in the day his Oblivion tweak guide worked very well for me. As did his Doom 3 one. So mileage may very. Not only that but he tends to go into a lot more detail about what different settings actually do. Most other .ini tweak articles I've read on the net are just copy and paste blogs.

Also your comment about "Higher graphics settings = lower FPS" ... yeah this doesn't apply to Skyrim. Some areas in Skyrim have poor FPS no matter what your settings are.

I've always appreciate his guides as frames of references to set the boundaries of what I could and couldn't do and how far I could go.

What I have seen in the game and I wonder if this is the memory leak is that I can go along for a while with great performance and everything's fine and then at some point I suddenly see my performance drop noticeably. And it only happens outside.

Yes, there are areas with [censored] FPS. But the "Higher graphics = lower FPS" still applies, of course it does.

Why the mess is it down again?!? I remember opening this thread within 45 minutes of it being created, and coming back periodically because the links never worked for me. I think his apologizing on his website was encouraged by Nvidia to cover something up. They do, after all, pay for his graphics cards. I've been following this guy for about a year, and every time I've been disappointed it has ALWAYS been linked to Nvidia. Whatever's going on, it would be better for everyone if it didn't. Just my two cents.

I bet it's because he recommend people to disable SLI in skyrim since it dont work properly

They need to sell some cards!

All of his guides are always long because he is tyring to appeal to a broad audience. Just skip pass all the noob [censored] and go straight to "advanced tweaking" in his guides and that's where all the meat is.

Guys, I understand and respect your opinions but lets keep the discussion about the guide and refrain from the negativity, please. Thanks.

Hmm looks like its down again or i just cant find it now, maybe he is revamping it and going into more details about more settings and tweaks. ( i hope)

It's still up (or back up). I used all but the ini tweaks and it really improves the look of Skyrim. But if you don't have a high end video card, you will get the predictably unacceptable frame rates.

the "five bla bla look better bla bla" is not the tweakguide guide

Its been taken down again it looks like.

The Geforce site looks good. I'll check it out - even though Skyrim runs pretty well on my system. I'd like to get it so that distant objects always show though - out to a configurable range beyond the default max.

Thanks for posting.

Yeah, you might want to look at the graphs again, because I'm 100% sure this does apply to Skyrim. Just like it applies to every single other PC game ever released in the past two decades.

When you make a generalization (which was what that snippet of my post was), you account for everything in the game performance-wise; the good spots and the bad. What you are interested in is the averages. I am aware of Skyrim's bad spots, and I am aware that the FPS hits do actually bottom out at a certain point due to the game being CPU limited, but for the overwhelming majority of the game, the higher you push the graphics, the more your framerates suffer. The averages prove this. Try comparing Ultra shadows to High shadows to get an idea.