Skyrim Special Edition
 

cant wait for the replay next week :D

I'll be replaying it as well but I will be waiting for mods to be made compatible with it.

I will also replay Skyrim, but I don't really care about the special edition. As far as I can tell, there isn't anything that it does that makes a difference for me. Outside of CBBE, I don't try to "pretty up" my game. I'm going to avoid Bnet as much as possible. It is to the point where I like Bethesda games but am not a fan of the company anymore.

Yeah my interest in the special edition is that it's 64 bit not the graphics upgrade.

Those graphics honestly look subpar… with a handful of mods, my game looked better four years ago. But I guess it's a good thing for new console owners - ie., the target audience of this latest cashgrab.

I just installed a new 1070gtx card, so I'll be looking to run Skyrim one last, boredom-inducing time. I certainly won't be bothering with this new edition, however, as I truly doubt that the mod authors who moved on with the game months, years ago will be coming back to update mods finished long ago (all for the sake of deferring to Bethesda bean counters).

The guy sounds like an irritating shill, who reckons the forests are now more "immersive" than real-life forests. :rolleyes:

Well others might be jaded, but i'm very much looking forward to booting up the PS4, relaxing on the couch and losing myself to a couple hundred more hours in pretty Nord country.

My currently installed modded Skyrim looks better than what was shown in the video. :/

I'll be curious to see how the modders take to it. Some of the new effects should take some of the load off ENBs, and 64bit is a big plus, but I bet they'll be grumpy about all the stuff it breaks.

I'm surprised many here are complaining about graphics. The graphics improvements are for console gamers not PC. The draw for PC players is the 64 bit exe. And the impact that can have with memory and mods.

Yes and no. An upgrade to a 64-bit exe would only benefit Windows 7 users if the engine is still DirectX 9 because Windows 10 simply can not use more than 4GB in DirectX 9 games regardless of whether you have a 32-bit, 64-bit or hypothetical 512-bit exe ;) . Windows 10 is always 4GB only if/when DirectX 9 is involved.
It has not been 100% confirmed to this day AFAIK that the renderer has been upgraded to DirectX 11. It is very likely because some of the new graphics features are supposed to be requiring DX11 but who knows… maybe Bethesda kind of "grafted" the effects on top of the DX9 engine with workarounds.
If the renderer is still DX9 then the 64-bit exe will do pretty much nothing for Win 10 users so let us hope that someone can confirm DX11 beyond a doubt real soon (does this YT guy say anything about DX9 to DX11 in his videos?).

Good info, I was unaware of the win 10/dx9 limitation. Thanks.

The only memory issues I ever had in a fully modded Skyrim was that of VRAM, which should now be rectified with my new overkill 8gb gfx card. The memory overflow crashes experienced with too many NPCs or world cells in the buffer was fixed long ago via Shesom and SKSE.

I'd love to see a properly working copy of Skyrim (new or old) ever use more than 4gb system memory - truly, I would.

Well, to clarify: Under Windows 10 and DirectX 9 Skyrim can only use exactly 4064MB of video RAM which consists partially of VRAM and partially of allocated system RAM so even if you had a 6GB or 8GB VRAM card it would do you no good on Windows 10 as long as Skyrim is DirectX 9.

Basically this…

DirectX 9 + 32-bit exe:

- Windows 7: Full VRAM but only 3.xGB system RAM
- Windows 10: 4064MB VRAM max and 3.xGB system RAM (minus whatever is also allocated by the video RAM through DirectX… there is an overlap)

DirectX 9 + 64-bit exe:

- Windows 7: Full VRAM and the sky is the limit
- Windows 10: 4064MB VRAM limit, and as far as system RAM goes, the sky is theoretically the limit but it is hampered by the 4064MB limitation

DirectX 11 + 32-bit exe:

- Windows 7: Full VRAM but only 3.xGB system RAM
- Windows 10: Full VRAM and only the same 3.xGB system RAM

DirectX 11 + 64-bit exe:

- Windows 7: Full VRAM and the sky is the limit
- Windows 10: Full VRAM and the sky is the limit

Why does this video look better than the above video? This video looks much better.

The official video has probably been "pimped" slightly ;) .

Thanks for that clarification, Moriendor - I never ran into those issues because I was working with within my old video card's 2gb limit.

The situation with DX9 is worse than it looks. Dx9 also mirrors a large amount of the VRAM in system RAM. So, combined with a 32bit exe in Skyrim, it creates major problems for heavy modders. As you fill the VRAM with textures and such, the RAM is also filled, and you soon hit the 4GB limit of the 32bit exe.

Despite having 186 hours I spose I should pull my finger out and finish the current edition then.

Eeeeexactly :biggrin: . By the way, another game where these Windows 10 DirectX 9 limitations and general 32-bit limitations just became apparent to me again is The Witcher 2. When I run the performance tester program that comes with the game it says:

- System memory 4095MB (this is the normal 32-bit limitation)
- Video memory 4093MB (this is thanks to Microsoft's DX9 limitations under Win 10)

For the record, I have 16GB of system RAM and a GTX 1070 with 8GB VRAM.

I really hope that Skyrim SE gets the full 64-bit and DirectX 11 treatment so we can finally put all those untapped hardware reserves to good use :) .

Any word on what was MS's rationale behind this Win10 change? Seems absurd.

I'm not sure… some people have actually submitted this as a bug to Microsoft and this is also a Windows 8.x issue, not just Win 10. I haven't found any official technical explanation for it when I dug into it a while back.

Interesting Reddit threads here:

Skyrim system RAM & VRAM: Comparison between Windows 7 & Windows 10
Windows 10 ENB Vram Limit. Any updated news?

I'm actually a little anxious that -against all expectations- Skyrim might not have a DX11 renderer in the Special Edition version because it has never been advertised as a feature bullet point and Bethesda usually like to advertise everything they can. I even made a thread on the official forums a while back but no one could 100% confirm DX11. People have only concluded from the graphical feature list of the SE that it must be the FO4 renderer and DX11 but is it really true? I guess we will find out in a few days and hopefully it'll be good news so we can forget about all this DX9 garbage :) .

I'd be pretty shocked if weren't based on DX11 at this point. The Xbone version must be essentially DX11, and I'd think that their whole workflow would be based around DX11 by now. Creating a 64bit DX9 game at this stage seems like a bizarre thing to do, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were all sorts of issues around trying to do so.

I agree with ripper, after doing a bit of research the overwhelming consensus seems to be it will be dx11 based on graphic techniques used, although I couldn't find any concrete verification from Bethesda themselves which admittedly worries me a bit because I've seen devs do dumber things.

One other worrisome thing I stumbled across was Bethesda saying old mods should mostly be compatible after being run through thier new 64bit compiler and then uploaded to Bethesda.net I assume/hope that's optional and I'll continue to be able to get my mods at the nexus.

At least on win7 and 32b dx9 you can use Bori's ENB memory management to get around the 4GB limit. I had 251 plugins and 355 mods installed, many 4K textures, on my win7 setup. My game ran better and was more stable than my current win10 setup for Skyrim which has 146 plugins and 250 mods total. Those numbers include all the official DLC plug-ins as well.

But you can't use the memory hacks Boris did on the win10. Its 4GB period. Little less actually for most folks as you need a buffer. The most common being around 3714 for the video setting in enblocal.

So at least win7 you can work around the limit but on win10 you can't at least for Dx9.

So glad I didn't opt for the "free" Win10 upgrade.

So glad I didn't get Hearthstone and forced into the special edition!

How's it being forced? It'll appear in your steam library as a second install a la DOS and DOS:EE

I think he's saying all DLC are included in the special edition. So you can't get the special edition without hearthstone. That's my guess anyway.

I'm getting the special edition for free as I already own Skyrim and all the DLC, I'll definitely give it another play-through as something I haven't tried in an ES game before. (Like, maybe a melee fighter. Or something.)

I'm interested to see the graphics on my top-of-the-line rig, honestly. The Witcher 3 was beautiful but unplayable for me due to the combat system; I prefer Skyrim type graphics and art anyway so I suspect this will be a relaxing treat of a game.

There's something really satisfying in Skyrim about holding up your shield and hearing the slam of your enemy's 2-handed battle axe against it.

Nope, he thought that this new version was over-writing the existing version. Which would be wrong. (D'oh!)

Anyway, lots more facts here: http://www.pcgamer.com/how-skyrim-sp…ames-and-mods/

Just fired it up on Steam. Still no native 21:9 Ultrawide support! Uuuuuhg.

How do you know what he was thinking.:lol:

Hmm, that sucks, I suppose the physics issue at over 60 fps is still a problem as well?

AHHHHH. Since i didnt have hearthfire i didnt get this for free.

I do. The thing is… I don't care for this re-release. Same shit new wrapping, there is no way I'd replay that nostory let's break a record how many trashmobs one can kill before uninstalling ever again.

Just couple of weeks ago I've finished playing around with the whole bunch of new mods so it will be a while before I will have try SSE. By that time a lot of mods will get converted AND there will be a whole new load of mods to try so I'm not in any hurry.

The physics issue was vastly improved too. A lot people love to blame Bethesda for not fixing bugs in the game, but don't understand the structure of the problems (Bethesda was maybe too ambitious, but they didn't ignore the issues, they optimized as best possible for such a complex AI system). One of the major issues of vanilla Skyrim, was everything they were trying to do within a limited 32-bit environment (not to mention they had further limitations within those limitations, especially since they needed to optimize the game on previous generation consoles). In other words, there was so much stuff happening in the game, that if TOO much stuff overwhelmed the hardware and software limitations, stuff would get weird and buggy. The move to 64-bit got rid of that limitation. This video does a much better job of explaining the major improvements and bug fixes in Special Edition:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6EjcESYIXk

Thanks for the link, Caddy. The new water looks nice, especially when flowing.