Friday, August 24, 2012

Weekly Report - 08/24/2012

This is a shorter report than usual, partly because last week's report ran a few days later than normal and included the weekend.

As previously mentioned, I finished the drab main quest in Skyrim and moved on to play some of the side quests. The Thieves Guild has been occupying a lot of my time this week.

I also recently discovered the High Resolution Texture Pack DLC (it's free) on Steam. I wish I had known this existed earlier, but oh well. After downloading and installing the DLC (it weighs in at roughly 3GB) I fired up the game for some questing. Wow! The upgraded textures stand out immediately even though my loaded save is underground. The stone walls of the Ragged Cistern really pop with the enhanced graphics. My framerate has suffered quite a bit but the game is still quite playable.

I play at 1920x1080 on a 24" monitor. The in-game settings are Ultra with 8xMSAA + 16xAF, so everything is maxed out (except I leave FXAA disabled because I don't like it). My system is an i5 2500k with 8GB RAM and a GeForce GTX 560 Ti. It feels like I could use a video card upgrade since downloading the new texture pack, but I'm not sure it's worth it. We'll see. It's $300, but I'm eyeing a new GTX 660 Ti. I'd like to upgrade to a 256GB OCZ Vertex 4 SSD as well, so there's another $180. I'm just not sure I play my PC enough to warrant the expense anymore (I like to relax on my couch so the Xbox 360 is used more and more).

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