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?

[SubRosa]

A better video card will certainly help performance. Whether it will get you to that smooth 60 fps... I dunno. There are of course other factors as well, how much RAM you have, how fast your RAM is (it comes in different speeds, which are of course limited by your motherboard), how fast your hard drive is, how fast your processor is, etc... But in the end, a new video card will definitely help.

You might never get it perfect. I have a pretty good machine - Intel i7 3.2 ghz, 16gb of DDR3 Ram, a Solid State hard drive, and two Nvidia GT 760 video cards in an SLI. But I still get what is called micro stutter. Sometimes my fps will drop by just a few digits - literally just from 60 only to 56 - and the game will very noticeably stutter. That is with Vsync on, which caps your fps 60. I manually turned Vsync off and my fps is usually over 100. But I still got that micro-stutter. So I turned it back on. From the Googling I have done, a lot of other people with good machines have the same issue.

You don't have to worry about looking for a Large Address Aware (a.k.a. 4gb) patch. That was built into one of Skyrim's patches. Since Steam forces you to update the game, you already have that.

I don't know of a single specific mod for Skyrim like OSR is for Oblivion. I have seen a lot of supposed fixes for stuttering. None of them have ever helped me, and many have made my game run worse. So they are a your mileage will vary situation. Google things, make backups, and try them one at a time and see what happens.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Dec 23 2014, 06:44 PM