The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim Performance Test

The fifth installment in Bethesda's long-running Elder Scrolls series took the industry by storm last Friday, earning an impressive aggregated review score of 95/100.

Based on early estimates, Skyrim has shipped seven million copies worldwide across all platforms, including digital stores such as Steam. During a peak hour last Monday, Valve's platform alone recorded some 287,000 Skyrim players -- greater than the combined peak activity of MW3, Counter-Strike, Football Manger 2012 and Team Fortress 2.

We usually don't open our performance reviews with sales figures, but we felt compelled to illustrate the magnitude of Skyrim's launch because role-playing games rarely garner this type of attention. Although its popularity is undoubtedly aided by the cult-like status of the Elder Scrolls franchise, Skyrim isn't just a clone of its predecessors (we're looking at you MW3). Bethesda has made many gameplay refinements, especially to the graphics and animations -- our area of interest.

For its day, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion had incredible visuals, leveraging advanced lighting and shader techniques such as HDR and specular mapping. In fact, before Crysis launched in 2007, Oblivion was arguably the most taxing PC game available. You'd have been lucky to see 50fps while exploring the expansive realm on high quality with a pair of ATI Radeon X1900 XTs (a $1,200 proposition at the time). We don't expect Skyrim to be that stressful, but we do have high hopes for its graphical fidelity.

While it may not bring your PC to its knees, Skyrim promises to be the best-looking Elder Scrolls title to date with its newly developed game engine, called the "Creation Engine." Among other things, the framework lets Skyrim display greater draw distances and produce a more realistic world overall. Shadows can be created by any object or structure, tree limbs and the flow of water can be affected by wind, and other weather effects have been introduced, such as dynamic snow fall.

As fun as it is to chat about Skyrim's graphics, we're dying to get a little more "eyes-on"...

Image Quality Comparison

Below are three sets of in-game screenshots that compare the low, medium, high, ultra and maximum quality settings. Click the pictures for a full-res 2560x1600 image.

The low and medium quality settings are very similar. There is slightly more detail when using the medium quality settings and the textures are improved. Oddly, the high quality preset looks much better than the ultra quality in our opinion. High offers more details overall, while ultra has softer shadows and lighting.

Unlike the previous set of pictures, there is a significant difference between low and medium here. The foliage off in the distance is softer when using the medium quality preset and there are small 3D rocks on the ground. Shifting from medium to high significantly improves texture quality and adds considerably more detail, such as the large rocks in the distance and the crisper textures.

Again, when going from high to ultra the overall image quality seems to be reduced, especially when comparing textures. Ultra only seems to improve the shadow quality while adding a few shrubs and rocks, while maximum offers a noticeable boost in detail. There's foliage on the distant mountain, while the mountains themselves have sharper, more detailed peaks. Shadows are also improved.

Skyrim's water quality was very similar when comparing the low and medium quality settings. Likewise, while there is a noticeable difference when shifting from medium to high, it's not drastic. Yet again, ultra seems to be a downgrade as it sacrifices texture quality for softer shadows and more foliage. Maximum restores the higher quality textures and improves most other visuals as well.

Testing Methodology

We tested Skyrim with 17 graphics cards spanning all price ranges and we installed the latest drivers available -- neither AMD nor Nvidia updated their drivers for this game. Fraps was used to measure frame rates during a minute of gameplay from the first level. The performance was measured from the beginning of the level, having played through the first few levels the frame rates here seemed to be about as low as they go.

We tested the game at three resolutions: 1680x1050, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 using the high, ultra and maximum presets.

High quality options

Ultra quality options

Maximum quality options

Test System Specs
- Intel Core i7 2600K
- x2 4GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 (CAS 8-8-8-20)
- Asus P8P67 Deluxe (Intel P67)
- OCZ ZX Series 1250w
- Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB (SATA 6Gb/s)
- GeForce GTX 580 (1536MB)
- GeForce GTX 570 (1280MB)
- GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1024MB)
- GeForce GTX 560 (1024MB)
- GeForce GTX 550 Ti (1024MB)
- GeForce GTX 480 (1536MB)
- GeForce GTX 470 (1280MB)
- GeForce GTX 460 (1024MB)
- Radeon HD 6970 (2048MB)
- Radeon HD 6950 (2048MB)
- Radeon HD 6870 (1024MB)
- Radeon HD 6850 (1024MB)
- Radeon HD 5870 (2048MB)
- Radeon HD 5830 (1024MB)
- Radeon HD 6790 (1024MB)
- Radeon HD 6770 (1024MB)
- Radeon HD 6750 (1024MB)
- Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit
- Nvidia Forceware 285.62
- ATI Catalyst 11.11

Using the high quality preset at 1680x1050, we were surprised by how well the relatively inexpensive Radeon HD 6750 performed (45fps), not to mention the GeForce GTX 550 Ti (65fps). When playing on high, Nvidia's graphics cards seemed to perform much better, as the GTX 560 managed 89fps versus the HD 6850's 77fps.

Increasing the resolution to 1920x1200 had a slight impact on performance as the HD 6750 dropped to 37fps, while the 6770 earned 40fps. The HD 6790 was garnered 50fps, which was only 3fps behind the GTX 550 Ti. The HD 6850 was able to match the GTX 460's performance with 67fps, while the GTX 560 hit 76fps.

Now at 2560x1600, the HD 6750, HD 6770 and GTX 550 Ti were unable to deliver playable performance. Furthermore, the HD 6790, 5830 and GTX 460 only provided borderline playable results. The GTX 560 and HD 6850 surprised us with an average of 36fps and 42fps -- not perfect, but tolerable frame rates.

Crysis 2 GPU & CPU Performance Test

Benchmarks: Extreme Performance

Using the extreme quality preset at 1680x1050 shows that Crysis 2 is every bit as demanding as the original. At this relatively low resolution, the GeForce GTX 580 barely cracked the 60fps barrier with an average of 64fps. The Radeon HD 6970 on the other hand averaged 49fps while the dual-GPU Radeon HD 6990 was just a fraction faster averaging 56fps.

The dual-GPU GeForce GTX 590 sailed along without any problems averaging 95fps, proving that SLI is working fine. We found that the single-player portion of the game requires an average of at least 40fps for smooth playable performance. Most of the graphics cards tested will provide satisfactory performance at 1680x1050.

However for perfectly smooth gameplay 50fps+ on average is warranted, which means you will need a very high-end graphics card.

Increasing the resolution to 1920x1200 pushed most cards below an average of 50fps, leaving just the GeForce GTX 580 and GTX 590 with ideal frame rates. The GeForce GTX 560 Ti averaged 40fps while the Radeon HD 6970 was only a fraction faster with 42fps and the GTX 570 jumped up another notch to 44fps.

At the massive resolution of 2560x1600, only the GeForce GTX 590 could deliver playable performance as even the GTX 580 fell below an average of 40fps.

CPU Performance

Crysis 2 fully utilizes four cores and is seemingly unplayable on dual-core processors. The Phenom II X2 560 averaged just 24fps while the Core 2 Duo E8500 was even slower at 23fps. With the aid of HyperThreading, the Core i3 540 managed an average of 56fps.

The quad-core Phenom II X4 970 matched the performance of the Core i7 920 with an average of 61fps. Meanwhile, the new Sandy Bridge processors that were the most impressive as the Core i7 2600K delivered 79fps when paired with the GeForce GTX 590.

Dragon Age II GPU and CPU Performance Test

A spiritual successor to the Baldur's Gate series, Dragon Age: Origins was the first game of its franchise. Unlike many others, BioWare was wildly successful in bringing this role-playing game to realization as a true multi-platform endeavor, spanning releases on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Mac, and of course, the PC.

Fans of the original game are no doubt excited about the recent release of Dragon Age II. Whereas many games these days are designed for console gaming and then ported to PC, Dragon Age II was initially designed for the PC platform. At the same time, BioWare has been adamant to assert the console versions of the title are not simply ports of the PC version, either.

Given our ability to fit out PCs with vastly superior hardware, it pays off when playing Dragon Age II. Right off the bat BioWare released a free high-resolution texture pack download designed exclusively for the PC version. Just as important, the game exclusively supports DirectX 11 on the PC providing cutting edge rendering features such as tessellation, additional dynamic lighting, depth of field and ambient occlusion (SSAO). When compared to DX9 we can confirm that Dragon Age II looks considerably better using the more advanced renderer.

The developer recommends at least a Core 2 Quad Q6600 or AMD Phenom II X3 processor suggesting that Dragon Age II will take advantage of more than two cores. For those happy to play the game using the older DX9 rendering technology BioWare recommends either a Radeon HD 3850 or Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS which are both very old graphics cards now.

Given the visual enhancements that DirectX 11 provides we suspect that most of our readers are going to want to take advantage of this rendering mode. BioWare recommends at least a Radeon HD 5850 or GeForce GTX 460 for those wanting to enjoy the DX11 features. These are powerful graphics cards leading us to believe that the game is very visually demanding.

With this in mind, we'll solely focus on DirectX 11 performance using over a dozen graphics cards capable of rendering Dragon Age II on all its visual glory. As usual we'll also be looking at CPU performance to see what kind of processor gamers are going to require to take full advantage of Dragon Age II.

As a side note we should point out that last month a playable demo of the game was released, which will allow you to get a feel of the game before investing your money. In the demo, players can venture through the game's prologue, choosing from three different character classes. Upon completion of the demo, players will unlock a special weapon, Hayder's Razor, an ancient dwarven blade which increases health, mana, and combat abilities, in the full release of Dragon Age II.