This Old Laptop

I play PC games on a Dell Studio 1737 with an Intel Core2Duo T6400, Mobility Radeon HD 3650, 4GB PC2-6400 SO-DIMM RAM, and a 500GB 7200 RPM HDD running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.

Yes, it's an old computer. No, I won't be able to afford to buy a new one any time soon.

My laptop handles games like TF2 and L4D2 on medium settings at 30+ frames per second.

Unfortunately, it doesn't handle a beefy game like Skyrim (which I recently received as an awesome gift from a fellow ToJ member) very well at all.

I can run the game at ~24 FPS using Low graphics settings, but bumping the settings to Medium and turning off anti-aliasing bumps me down to ~15 FPS. The game looks amazing on High graphics settings, but runs like a slideshow.

I was looking at tweaking the individual graphics settings (e.g. FXAA, Radial Blur Quality, Distant Object Detail, etc.), but I didn't know what settings would have the most impact on performance and image quality.

I've been out of the INI-tweaking, overclocking, beefy video card loop for what seems like forever now, so any tricks and tips to squeeze a little more juice out of an old laptop is much appreciated.

To start: What in the world is FXAA and how much performance will I gain by turning it off?

EDIT: Why on earth would Skyrim set my graphics settings to High after selecting Default and the launcher detecting my system hardware?

I notice Americans can rent TVs, Washer/Dryer and other household appliances.

Why not rent Computers/Laptops?

http://www.rentex.com/

And you could of googled FXAA...

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/11/02/battlefield_3_single_player_performance_iq_review/7

Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing; it is an effective and very fast approximation of multi-sampling in a single-pass shader program. It smoothes geometry edges, alpha texture edges, lighting edges, and specular aliasing. And it does these things very quickly.

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Tek7 said:

To start: What in the world is FXAA and how much performance will I gain by turning it off?

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Fast Approximate Antialiasing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmeNz0NTvFQ Sounds like a Nvida performance improvement to antialiasing methods. I wouldn't know how to get it to run better but I do know people are already making Skrim mods. As such there may be one to help performance.

I'm not ready to play it yet (busy mapping) but I've been looking at graphics mods for Oblivion since I bought it on sale. When you go to look for Skryim mods be prepared to avoid some. Hopefully they haven't hit Skyrim yet but Oblivion's mod community is half full of perverts and the other half are Japanese perverts XD.

Edit: Five second search turned up this http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=123 . I think "engrish" is not his first language though more importantly who knows what it could do to your compy, up to you.

I would play with the individual settings and look for what makes the biggest improvement in playability.

I wouldn't overclock a laptop - ever. Laptops have limited ventilation when compared to desktops/towers and therefore you have a much higher chance to totally ruin your laptop. Don't do it. Buy Bowser's desktop instead.

Odale said:

I would play with the individual settings and look for what makes the biggest improvement in playability.

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Aye, I did that earlier tonight. Here's that I changed:

• Set graphics to Medium
• Changed Anti-aliasing to Off
• Disabled FXAA
• Disabled Water - Reflect Land
• Enabled Water - Reflect Sky

Now I get about ~22-25 FPS and the game looks considerably better than it does on Low settings.

Odale said:

I wouldn't overclock a laptop - ever. Laptops have limited ventilation when compared to desktops/towers and therefore you have a much higher chance to totally ruin your laptop. Don't do it.

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Oh, no way would I overclock my laptop video card. I have no budget for a replacement and my laptop is out of warranty. If this computer dies, I'm stuck browsing the web and sending e-mails from my desktop computer (which I currently use for a media center PC, but can't use to play most 720p fansubs because they lag too bad).

Odale said:

Buy Bowser's desktop instead.

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I can't afford $600 right now, so that's right out, unfortunately.

If I get the job I mentioned elsewhere on the forums, I'll be able to set aside a little at a time for a new desktop. Until then, I'll whittle away at my backlog, watch for Steam sales on indie games, and explore Skyrim in its Low-Medium graphics glory (which is still quite pretty).

So I was reading that Skyrim only uses 2GB of memory, which is a bummer, since I have 4GB RAM in my laptop and I'd think Skyrim taking advantage of that extra memory would improve performance (and I need every bit of computing power I can get).

Here's hoping Bethesda will issue a proper patch (and not just one that adds the Steam DRM that they intended to include at launch) soon.

there is a mod that allows it to use all 4gb. It seems to work well.

ewoksrule said:

there is a mod that allows it to use all 4gb. It seems to work well.

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I'd read that it was broken by the latest official patch. Is there a new version of the mod?

Can you backup your saves, uninstall, reinstall, and use the mod without updating?

Edit: Also, this thread reminds me of This Old House.

Odale said:

Can you backup your saves, uninstall, reinstall, and use the mod without updating?

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why?

Odale said:

Can you backup your saves, uninstall, reinstall, and use the mod without updating?

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Nope. Steam would download the latest version when I reinstalled.

It's all moot now because there's a new launcher that enables the game to make use of more than 2GB of memory. You can download it here.

I haven't noticed any substantial changes using the mod (unfortunately), but I've read that it helped others resolve random crashing issues.

Odale said:

Edit: Also, this thread reminds me of This Old House.

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Yep. That's what I was going for.