Definitely excellent review.

I have been playing at 1080p on MAX settings with 2 GTX 280 in SLI (using the beta driver just released from NVIDIA, else SLI is not supported) and an Core 2 Duo OC to 3.8GHz.

Indoor scenes i got smooth 60FPS all the tyme (limtied by vsync, otherwsie probably would get more).

Outdoor i get about 40-50fps.

However, both GPUs are only 40-50% utilized each, while both CPU cores are used 97%,

Definitely your CPU is primary bottleneck for this this game.

I will try reducing shadows. I was wondering of a core 2 quad will help, it was interesting that the review said only one core was used at max, with the core 2 duo both cores were used at max.

Skyrim works on exactly the same 5 x 5 exterior cell grid as the Oblivion version of the Gamebryo engine so "draw distance" is the same as Oblivion. Type TCL in the console fly high in the sky, type TB in the console then look down and see an identical 5 x 5 grid as in Oblivion. The grid outline is even the same colour, do an identical procedure in Oblivion to compare. This is not meant as a criticism of the interesting article nor of the Creation Engine. I wish this engine had been available for Oblivion, it renders much more efficiently.

If the game doesn't scale well beyond 4 cores, why is the 3960X so much faster than the 2600k?

hi, how exactly do you set it to maximum as there is no max in the options/ advanced settings windows.

Certainly the best skyrim performance review out there. It must be because skyrim is often labeled as a crappy console port because sites never seem to want to use it a benchmarking tool so its exceeding difficult to find graphic card comparisons for the game.

Im running a i5 2500k OC to 4.3 ghz and radeon 6870 stock. I have tried overclocking the gpu but even at 945/1125 i only gain barely one fps. I get solid 60 fps anywhere thats not on the world map, 40-50 on most world map areas, and 30 fps in dense towns like whiterun. I'm at 1080p with "max" settings.

Based on the graphs it looks like going from a 6870 to a 6950 gives no performance improvement at 1050p, 4 fps at 1200p, and 2 fps at 1600p. is it safe to assume i made the right choice going with 6870 rather than 6950 and that i would see almost no gains if i were to upgrade?