Starting Skyrim on PC Options

[Renee]

Yes, it looks like it's finally happening. It's raining and lovely outside, and is supposed to do so all through Sundas. I mean Sunday. And I am going to maybe start Skyrim on PC tomorrow.

So what I want to do here is to collect any advice the community here at Chorrol feels like contributing. For instance: I still want to install my game outside of Program Files, right? That sort of advice. I have heard that modding Skyrim is different from Oblivion.

What's the best (easiest, actually) mod manager to use? That's a good place to start. OBMM isn't as fancy as Wrye Bash, for instance, but I still use OBMM most of all because it does what I need it to do. And so I am assuming Skyrim also has several mod managers to try using, right?

I'm pretty excited about my first character. I already know a lot about him, since he is based on a character one of my friends from high school (1980s, lol) created. The only tricky thing is this character will be Asian, and I'm going to want some Asian face-tweaking mod, because I could never create this guy with vanilla tools on Xbox (yes, I tried). Anybody know a mod that adds some Asian elements to faces?

[Lopov]

When you install the game, I suggest you disable both Antialiasing and Anisotropic filtering in the launcher. From my experiences, it significantly reduces loading time and makes the game run smoother. They say that the game looks better with AA and AF enabled but I haven't noticed any important difference.

[SubRosa]

When you install the game, I suggest you disable both Antialiasing and Anisotropic filtering in the launcher. From my experiences, it significantly reduces loading time and makes the game run smoother. They say that the game looks better with AA and AF enabled but I haven't noticed any important difference.

It all depends on how powerful a computer you have. On my rig, I don't see any slow down at all from turning the AA and AF all the way to the max. But I have a pretty good machine. People with older, slower ones will likely see an impact. The only way to know is to try turning them on and seeing how it plays.

OTOH, I could not play it with them turned off. To me the difference is very glaring. Most especially are the jagged edges on diagonal lines, such as bowstrings. For a while I was using FXAA - the poor man's version of Anti Aliasing - but when I took some screenshots and compared them side by side with 'standard' AA, I realized how much worse FXAA looks. That is because it reduces jagged edges by softening the image. So the entire picture looks a little blurred. Now I cannot play with FXAA at all.

It all depends on the individual, and what you perceive is looking good or not, or even simply not mattering or not. I have gotten spoiled lately with having a good computer and top of the line video cards. So I always go for the best.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Dec 7 2014, 02:28 AM