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]

Happy Holidays and thank you once again. That's one thing I wanted to ask about: Vsync. How do we turn this on? I don't see an option in the game, or in the game's launcher options.

It's interesting because framerates are all over the place in that Tutorial dungeon, and they're going way over 60 sometimes, and I'm like "Hey video card, you don't have to work that hard!"

Vsync is on by default in Skyrim. The game doesn't even give you an option to turn if off. Instead you can only manually shut it off by editing an .ini file. Or you can do it through the Nvidia Control Panel. Right-Click on your desktop, and you should see an option for it in the box that pops up. In the panel, go to Manage 3d Settings, and then to the Program Settings tab. Pick out Skyrim from the list (it is probably called tesv.exe). Way down at the bottom of the list of things you can tweak is Vsync, which actually has several different options besides On and Off. While you are at it, be sure you turn Triple Buffering On as well, as it helps performance when Vsync is On.

I'd suspect the micro-stutter is more likely to be CPU interruptions from tasks the OS deems more urgent than the game. Multiple cores mean less of it, but sometimes the interruption involves all of them waiting for a central event to complete.

In the old days, you'd disconnect a gaming computer from the 'net, so that nothing external could interrupt it (and you could turn off the AV too), but now the games want the umbilical in place, if only to launch.

It could be the CPU, but I kind of doubt it. It isn't the very best anymore, but it is still a fast chip. And I even went the extra distance to unpark the unused cores recently. I also run a very clean computer. I make sure TSRs don't launch with Windows, except for one I need for my sound card, another I need to create a virtual dvd drive, and finally my anti-virus. Of course I need to have Steam running to play Skyrim. This weird micro-stutter is something that no one has ever been able to really solve. I suspect it might have more to do with the game itself rather than the computer. Bethesda's games are notorious for their poor coding, and this does not happen with any other game.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Dec 27 2014, 01:36 AM