This little bit posted on Ars Technica might help you decide what card to buy. For me, I'll play it for a bit on my 4870 still as I'm waiting for the 7000s to show up before I buy.
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It's a texture-happy last-gen beast. It's not big on shaders (mostly post-processing and HDR lighting), it's big on textures. It'll fill 1.7 GB of VRAM without trying on "Ultra". "High" limits it to 1 GB.
The snow effects are done with animated meshes and animating textures. One small hut will have more vertices in it than the entire Imperial City of Oblivion. Texture detail is exquisite. It's the last generation taken to a dizzying extreme.
Underneath it all, though, there's a SM3.0 DX9.0c rendering engine not at all unlike the one you saw in Fallout: New Vegas. It's the same magnitude of upgrade that Fallout 3 made from Oblivion. Evolutionary, not revolutionary.
This means that all you really need is a lot of very fast VRAM. 128 bit buses need not apply. If you're not pushing 70 GB/s around the video card, you won't like playing on High at 1080p. If you can max out Oblivion and get 100 FPS, you'll get 60 FPS in Skyrim on High, not on Ultra.
Oh yeah, and they fixed the multithreading crap that plagued Oblivion and Fallout 3. It'll now peg four cores if you've got 'em without going all CTDish.
Animation, from what I've seen, remains a Bethesda weak point. Chip an enemy's health bar to zero and they'll flop down in the middle of a mighty sword swing as though the strings were cut on a puppet. It makes you feel like you're fighting robots and just waiting for the lucky hit which will knock the "off" button. AI is, again, something that in places you'll admire and in other places you'll wonder what the fuck is going on. You WILL turn an entire town hostile and have no idea why. On the other extreme, you'll return a worthless trinket to a random elven NPC and she'll be your faithful sla... companion until death. Most likely at your hands, given how often she'll run in the way of your arrows/spells/shouts. Given how easy it is to pick up faithful slav... friends, this is a game begging for a friendly fire toggle.
Physics is improved, but like with many other things Skyrim, has its caveats still. You won't brush past a table and wreck a house, but you will accidentally hit a giant corpse and send it into the stratosphere with a moderately weak spell. Townsfolk will comment on your littering when you do so, just the same as when you drop an item of clutter into the village square.
Using up to 1.7GB of VRAM is not the same as needing 1.7GB of VRAM. Battlefield 3 just loads textures quicker with a 2GB card over a 1GB card but it doesn't negatively affect the performance if you only have a 1GB card.
This game is not upgrade worthy. Unlocked it on Steam via an Australian vpn.
This is the worst kind of console port. Not just in the UI being clunky and awkward from being a port, but the graphics are horrible and performance is very poor.
Terrible, terrible console port. Can't comment on actual gameplay, only had time to get about 15 minutes in, but going to assume it's crap due to aforementioned console port issues. Very dissapointing.
Reviews were glowing for MW3 too.
Until i saw it running on a friend's PC. Ugly. Same cliche storyline and SP thats not even 4 hours long.
MP, same as black ops and MW2. It's like a DLC map pack.
Yet it got glowing reviews (user reviews is totally different). Fishy.
Recycled console port.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5dsOn06w1s&feature=player_embedded#!
What proof does anyone have that Skyrim is a port from consoles? I bet absolutely zero.
I was planning on buying it, but the console port nature's putting me off.
Can't say I had any real drama's with either FO3 or Vegas on PC+texture packs...
Thats the problem, you actually had to mod it to make it look good. Why didn't they include a high-res texture for the PC version?
Other than simply looking at it, Bethesda said it's a console port.....so GFX expectations could be lowered.
That's the thing, Bethesda's games have tons of bugs/glitches and not the best interface. However, gameplay is still going to be great.
The reviews are glowing. This is for sure going to be RPG of the year on the PC. You just have to play it for a couple of hours and I am sure you'll be hooked
I mean seriously, Gamespy gave it 100, IGN 95, PC Gamer UK 94, Gamespot 9.0.
On Gamerankings, this game got an average score of 95.28% across 40 reviews.
There is 0 chance this game is terrible. It might not be amazing, or the best ever RPG, but at minimum it's good/great.
As far as RPG of the year, that is far and away Witcher 2.
I'm not saying the game is crap, as I said, I only played 15 minutes. Graphically it's a massive turd. It's looking to be another Dragon Age 2, terrible graphics and horrible performance. I want to see some AMD benchmarks, I know it makes use of the same DOF effects DA2 did, may be more nvidia driver issues.
It's really a terrible port. You can't even click any selections in the menu with your mouse, you have to use a combination of different keys on your keyboard to navigate the menus and inventory screens, etc. Really ? No mouse support ?
Thats the problem, you actually had to mod it to make it look good. Why didn't they include a high-res texture for the PC version?
Dirt 3 doesn't support your mouse either.
No need if you have a wheel though.
hose games didn't seem to get poor reviews from gamers. Apparently Bethesda had a party when MS announced the vram on the 360 was upgraded to 512 lol.
For menus? That's what I meant...I wasn't clear on that. Either way I use an Xbox 360 controller anyway.