Hey folks, I have a question for you.

Skyrim has just landed and hell, I'm really excited about that, can't wait to get my hands on it! BUT.

I have to save some money for now (just paid 900 euros for the university fee :S) and I still have a LOAD of games to play (Dawn Of War II Series and ALL the GTAs, purchased for as little as 7.50 euros for the whole bundle ^^). So, I'm gonna wait a little, maybe there will be one of those great Steam Sales and I'm gonna get it for a low price.

Anyway, my PC won't change for that time and I'd like to know if the purchase makes sense. It's also something that keeps me on the edge with Rage, for example.

I have a Toshiba Satellite, with an Intel Core i5 M 430, Nvidia GeForce GT330M, 4GB RAM and a 500GB HDD.

Will I enjoy Skyrim with a reasonable amount of detail or will it be a low-FPS fest?

Thank you in advance.

I wouldn't expect much. Maybe at low settings with some tweaking is playable at a decent framerate, despite its relatively low system requirements. I've seen the game run quite well on old desktop hardware, but mobile GPUs and CPUs are even weaker than that. Either way, just install it and try it. You'll have to link it to your Steam account regardless of the computer you're playing on, so no worries there.

I am not 100% familiar with that GPU, also I've heard rather mixed reviews. What I can clear up is that so long as it fits within the bottom threshold of the system requirements, you should be able to play the game pretty enjoyably, as long as you don't mind about the highest settings. I'd try to figure out exactly how much video memory your GPU has.

Earlier I was tweaking with some of the config files on the PC version and found it amusing that you can indeed set it at 640x480 res if you really want to play it on a system that... can barely run it. (Toying with my own laptop) Of course, I have no idea what bugs this might cause, etc. It did load up just fine for me though. Made me feel like I was playing Morrowind. =D

I was thinking the exact same question. I´ve got a Dell Studio 17 laptop with Intel Core i5, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 graphic card, 4gb ram and 500 gb HDD. Should I be able to run it well=

I agree with the above that it sounds like you should be concerned about being able to run it at all.

I play it on a labtop and it runs pretty well. But mine is a little better than yours.

The game recommended high setting but I turned them down to medium because I prefer high framerate. The graphic are still pretty good if you don't stop to watch every single textures. I barely get any slowdown. The only time that happened it never got under 20 frames second.

I'm no expert, but you should be able to play it, at least at low settings. I'm pretty sure the game will still be enjoyable.

@Starfishhunter9 said:

I agree with the above that it sounds like you should be concerned about being able to run it at all.

Exactly, that's why I started this topic ;)

Anyway,@snowballingblood @JoeyRavn my GPU has 1GB RAM, what do you think about that?

@Fear_the_Booboo said:

I play it on a labtop and it runs pretty well. But mine is a little better than yours.

The game recommended high setting but I turned them down to medium because I prefer high framerate. The graphic are still pretty good if you don't stop to watch every single textures. I barely get any slowdown. The only time that happened it never got under 20 frames second.

I'm no expert, but you should be able to play it, at least at low settings. I'm pretty sure the game will still be enjoyable.

Oh, nice one, that's encouraging at least. Anyway, time to save money for a little monster, I suppose ^^

@Porkellain: On good laptops it is.

I can play pretty comfortably on high settings on my laptop but i don't know how it compares exactly to yours

http://www.giantbomb.com/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim/61-33394/will-my-computer-run-this-yeah-sorry-another-one-of-these/35-523302/#23

Near the bottom of the first page is a list of processors and how they should run the game, seemed pretty accurate to me. glhb

It runs just fine on my Asus 5551G laptop on high.

I can assure you it most certainly is. I'm running the game on High, with an FPS of 30-50 during the majority of gameplay. It looks great, plays wonderfully.

My specs are:

• Core i7 q720 @1.6GHz
• Mobility Radeon HD5730 1gb
• 4 GB RAM

@Porkellain said:

@Starfishhunter9 said:

I agree with the above that it sounds like you should be concerned about being able to run it at all.

Exactly, that's why I started this topic ;)

Anyway,@snowballingblood @JoeyRavn my GPU has 1GB RAM, what do you think about that?

VRAM will only factor in in terms of textures, AA and shadows. But apart from that, the amount of VRAM is a neglegible difference between GPUs. What really matters is the architecture of the card. In other words, a 6600GT 1GB is much worse than a 8800GT 512MB. While the former has double the amount of VRAM, the latter is much faster. The 330M is not a gaming card by any means. I have a similar laptop, with an i3 and a 330M, and it struggles to play the most basic 2D games.

BTW, I thought that you already had the game. If I were you, I'd wait a bit for it to go on sale and for you to have a better PC. You can definitely play it on your laptop, but I wouldn't say High will be a confortable setting to play it in. Skyrim is a game that you should try to play as best as you can. You'll be spending a shitload of time with it, struggling to get a decent framerate is not the way to go.

I don't know about Skyrim, but I've always found Bethesda's games really well optimised for less than perfect hardware. I've got a 3 year old laptop with a 9500M as a graphics card, and pretty average processor too, and I've always managed to get Fallout 3 and Oblivion running extremely well with decent graphics settings. Obviously this is a new engine and a different game, but if they've optimised it as well as they have those previous games, you should be fine.

On my laptop (C2D T8100 2.3ghz, 8600M GT 256MB @ 634/550, 4GB DDR2) it runs 30-50fps with these settings:

800x600, AA offf, 2x aniso., Textures: Medium, Radial Blur & Shadow Detail: Low, Decal: Medium, No FXAA or water reflections. VSync: Off.

Since your lappy is a bit more powerful than mine (probably gets around 6500 in 3dMark06), I would guess you can run the same settings at 1280x720 or at least 1024x768. Yeah, the settings may look bad on paper, but it doesn't look so bad in the game. It's still effing gorgeous.

@JoeyRavn: Yea, I see your point there. Still, I can assure you that I'm not having major issues playing other games. Recently I played Darksiders and it went like a charm on maximum settings, and even the other games I have work pretty decently. My most recent game is Brink, that uses Tech 4 engine, and I have no problems at all, plus I tried the Space Marine Demo and still, no problems. The only game that seems a little sluggish is GTAIV, but looks like the PC version is quite shizzle.

I started the thread to see if a future purchase would be worth it and also to help other people like me that have mid-low term systems.

Anyway posts like yours, @MattyFTM's and @Lunar_Aura's seem very encouraging, guess I'll enjoy Skyrim when I'll purchase it :)

PS. Matty, I need the quest, visit my profile pretty pleeeze with sprinkles! :D

I'm playing on medium-high settings with AA and about 15 FPS. Not very pleasant, if you ask me. Hopefully my 360 copy arrives today.

Your topic title is a little misleading. You should have said, "Is Skyrim enjoyable on my laptop?" Anyways the game runs great on my laptop and is very enjoyable. Especially since I'm doing 1080p, Ultra detail. Then again I'm on an Alienware laptop with SLI GPU's, an I7, 16 GB of RAM, and RAID 0 hard drives.

It seems like a terrible idea.

@ShadowSkill11: Argh, you're right. Wish I could rename it, maybe it would be something like "Is Skyrim enjoyable on mid-low end laptops?". Anyway it's the second thread I start, so next time ;)

Nice avatar by the way :)

@Porkellain said:@Thiemen:

Hey folks, I have a question for you.

Skyrim has just landed and hell, I'm really excited about that, can't wait to get my hands on it! BUT.

I have to save some money for now (just paid 900 euros for the university fee :S) and I still have a LOAD of games to play (Dawn Of War II Series and ALL the GTAs, purchased for as little as 7.50 euros for the whole bundle ^^). So, I'm gonna wait a little, maybe there will be one of those great Steam Sales and I'm gonna get it for a low price.

Anyway, my PC won't change for that time and I'd like to know if the purchase makes sense. It's also something that keeps me on the edge with Rage, for example.

I have a Toshiba Satellite, with an Intel Core i5 M 430, Nvidia GeForce GT330M, 4GB RAM and a 500GB HDD.

Will I enjoy Skyrim with a reasonable amount of detail or will it be a low-FPS fest?

Thank you in advance.

it will run on medium fine most likely. I have a toshiba qosmio with a close build to yours.

i5 m450 2.40ghz

4gb

64bit win 7

graphics is a GTX 360m

HD doesnt matter as the game is saved onto my 1tb xternal instead of the onboard since that is full atm >.>

With that I have skyrim on the default high and it runs with 0 frame drop. I dropped AA from 8 to 4 just so i could raise all of the distance bars to max and it looks Great. 100% Better then the console versions.

@McShank: Man you got me SO pumped! Stop it, I promised I would save money for this month :D

*goes to burn his credit card before the temptation gets too high*

@Porkellain: i bought the game when I dont start work till monday.. I spent what could have been gas money -.- How do you think i feel. Least I have skyrim to to cover up my broke wallet.

There's a video somewhere on YouTube where someone with a MacBook Air(!) plays Skyrim next to a PS3 and the framerate and graphics is almost identical. I wonder what Daedra Bethesda had to make human sacrifices to, to make it run that good on such limited hardware.

My thoughts.  
Install Oblivion and see how that runs. 
 
My Dads computer runs the game flawlessly (barely dips below 30 fps) at 1080p with High - Medium settings.  While Oblivion maxed out struggled to hit 30fps. It's a desktop but the specs are:

• Core 2 Duo 6750
• 2 Gig of DDR2
• 8800GT (Stock Speed)
  

• Core i5 -760 (custom cooler and overclocked)
  
• 4 Gig of DDR3
• GTX 480 (custom cooler and overclocked)
• SSD
  

There's a video somewhere on YouTube where someone with a MacBook Air(!) plays Skyrim next to a PS3 and the framerate and graphics is almost identical. I wonder what Daedra Bethesda had to make human sacrifices to, to make it run that good on such limited hardware.

my laptop is three years old. it's a toshiba qosmio x305. the only issue i'm currently having is somewhat shitty frame rates in highly populated and/or dense areas. once i turned down the shadows and dropped the graphics quality down to very high, my frame rate improved.

Don't worry. I have the exact same specs as you, even on i3. As long as you don't mind low graphics (which still looks very very decent), and a bit of tweaking, it's gonna run real smooth. Honest, this game no matter how high the graphic settings are, is still kinda like Morrowind. You're not in Skyrim for the graphics right?