Is my laptop really up to Skyrim

[worldno1bn]

Hi all,

I'm really sorry as I know this has probably been said a million times before but basically having problems with frame rate when playing Skyrim. It starts off at 23 FPS but after 5 mins of playing it drops to <11. My laptop is a Dell 1558 (2 years old) and the specs are as follows:

Intel i7-720QM(1.6GHz) CPU
4096MB (2x2048) 1333MHz DDR3 RAM
500 GB Serial ATA (7200RPM) hard drive
1GB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470
Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit

Basically the frame rates I see are on a medium setting with antrisopic and anti-aliasing turned off and using GameBooster.

I'm not really asking anyone to help me fix this problem as I know there are soooooo many threads out there with the subject of FPS problems (I really don't want to be hounded by someone saying stop making forum post with subjects that are already out there. My question is specific to my laptop specs/age). All I'm asking is should my laptop in theory be performing better or am I better off getting a new laptop. If it should be performing better I can try and work it out from here but would greatly appreicate anyone with a yay or nay anwser to is my laptop specs up to running skyrim.

Cheers!!!!

 

[worldno1bn]

BUMP! :-)

 

[psyk0]

Your processor is probably the main issue. Minimum requirements for Skyrim state a 2.0Ghz processor or higher. Your GFX card and RAM should be absolutely fine though.

Without a faster processor it's likely you won't be able to achieve impressive FPS on anything higher than lowest quality, so if you're going to upgrade, that should be your starting point.

 

[worldno1bn]

Cheers man. Though surely my CPU shouldn't be the issue when its a Quad core i7. I see the min requirements for skyrim are 2.0GHz dual core and recommended is an Intel Quad (with no specified clock speed) which is what I got. Or do I definitely need to have a quad core with at least 2.0 GHz?

 

[Rayven]

On my Dell (Precision M90, probably 4 years old or so), the thing that helped the most is decreasing the two options for "distance" (I think it's object distance and item distance or similar). I don't run any kind of boosters or additional software on it but it makes it run smoothly on low settings even though my system is below minimum specs.

Edited to say: Apparently my beast was manufactured in 2006, making it 6 years old! So, there's always hope

 

[worldno1bn]

Cool man thanks for that. Last night I manage to get a stable 21 - 23 FPS but was still pants. I do have the Xbox 360 version too but I got the PC version too for all the cool mods so bit gutting at the moment it's not quite performing. Just annoying having to tinker away to get the thing to work.

 

[Rayven]

Cool man thanks for that. Last night I manage to get a stable 21 - 23 FPS but was still pants. I do have the Xbox 360 version too but I got the PC version too for all the cool mods so bit gutting at the moment it's not quite performing. Just annoying having to tinker away to get the thing to work.

Well the tinkering is part of the PC process, I'm afraid. We have such a huge variety of different PC hardware, it takes a bit of tweaking for us all to get it just perfect sometimes.

Do you have the current drivers for your graphics card? I will warn you though, always keep a backup of the old drivers on a Dell. I don't use the current driver and that's on purpose. Some of them just don't perform nearly as well for games. But definitely do some research and make sure you've got the best suited driver for your machine. Obviously, if you're years out of date, it might be better to update. Since your machine is only 2 years old, I would have hoped they got the driver thing worked out.

 

[worldno1bn]

Well the tinkering is part of the PC process, I'm afraid. We have such a huge variety of different PC hardware, it takes a bit of tweaking for us all to get it just perfect sometimes.

Do you have the current drivers for your graphics card? I will warn you though, always keep a backup of the old drivers on a Dell. I don't use the current driver and that's on purpose. Some of them just don't perform nearly as well for games. But definitely do some research and make sure you've got the best suited driver for your machine. Obviously, if you're years out of date, it might be better to update. Since your machine is only 2 years old, I would have hoped they got the driver thing worked out.

I updated my GPU driver to the latest one (that was taking it from ATI not Dell) but didn't do anything. Are there any other drivers that I might need to update?

 

[Rayven]

For framerate, I'd think the graphics ones would be the most important. Since you have an ATI card though, are you running catalyst? If you are, what version?

Also, are you using the high res texture pack?

 

[worldno1bn]

Ah that's where it might be a problem. The catalyst I'm running is version 11.11 and it's on 12.4. So that might be something to check out. No I didn't dare try and high texture mods until I could get it running quickly. I did have the SkyBoost mod but it's not compatible with the Skyrim 1.5 update.

 

[Rayven]

Avoid the high texture mods. And do make sure it's Catalyst 12.4 and NOT 12.3 when you get it. The 12.3 one caused much silliness for people trying to play Skyrim.

 

[worldno1bn]

Oh really!? Ha. Cheers man I really appreciate this. Hopefully that will sort it out a treat!

 

[mcfrg]

Your processor should be fine. I compared your processor with others, and it looks like a really good one. Check out these benchmarks, you'll see it in spot 63 with turbo capability up to 2800 Mhz. You should be able to activate turbo mode somehow.
Your graphics card however could cause an issue. My laptop has a slightly better graphics card (HD 4650) and can run Skyrim, but it's not exactly a smooth experience on high settings (the recommended default) on a 16'' screen. My laptop processor runs at 2200 Mhz.

 

[Rayven]

My Dell has an NVIDIA Quadro FX 1500M running a driver from 2009 with 256MB RAM and I can run on low settings with the distance pulled down a touch.

Looks like I have 3GB of RAM and a 2.17 GHz processor.

 

[Dagmar]

Regarding your CPU, the requirements for clockspeed are not specified for quad core CPUs because it's the same as it is for dual cores. Having 2 more cores is irrelevant to clockspeed requirements for an application, but your CPU uses Intel Turbo Boost Technology which means that as long as your computer has sufficient power and the cores are not running too hot, they will automatically overclock to up to 2.8 GHz for that particular CPU if an application requires it so your CPU is not an issue.

Your video card is another matter entirely. It's really not strong enough to run Skyrim as you can see from the game performance tests run for it at notebookcheck.com. (Rayven's Quadro FX 1500M, while also relatively weak actually tested better for Skyrim than the Radeon HD 5470.) If you want to play Skyrim with that laptop you'll have to do lot of tweaking with mostly low settings. Calling anything less than 25 fps stable is a bit of an oxymoron because below 25 fps any game will stutter and motion will not appear very fluid so you should keep tinkering with .ini settings (or get a better computer).

What's your native resolution? Lowering the resolution can help significantly and depending on whether you were running Skyrim at a high resolution like 1920x1080 lowering the resolution to something like 1366x768 wont make a noticeable difference in the visual quality because the textures in Skyrim are not very high resolution in general.