The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a very popular action role playing DX 9.0c game. I’m not gonna describe it or review or anything like that. The target of this page is to offer laptops that will run Skyrim on some certain settings. This will be one of a series of short articles (if you can call it like that) to help laptop buyers choose their purchase according to the games they would like to play. This can many times a better performance reference when you have games in mind and you don’t want to just throw as much money as you can on a gaming laptop.
So, lets start with Skyrim, just remember that these number are per specific benchmark and situation – getting 40FPS for running along the mountains is not like a scene with 100 characters and sometimes performance could be lower or higher. The idea is to recommend a gaming laptop that will make you happy in the less extreme situations.
Skyrim on 1080p
According to notebookcheck benchmarks, to run Skyrim on ultra settings, 1080p resolution and 8xAA+16xAF, you’ll need something like the GTX 660M at least. However, 8xAA is a really high AA level and 4xAA is great also. Anandtech benchmark says that the GT 650M GDDR5 will play Skyrim on ultra settings, 1080p resolution and 4xAA filter smoothly with almost 35 FPS averagly. Now, as said before, you have to remember that these numbers
Although Anandtech and notebookcheck don’t benchmark in the same way, the numbers seem about right – reducing the settings from AAx8 to AAx4 will give a performance bump no matter the difference between the GT 650M and GTX 660M (~15%).
| QUICK SUGGESTIONS | ||
| 1080p, ultra settings, 2xAA or 4xAA at least | I7 + GTX 660M | Lenovo Y580, Sager NP6350 (660M) / NP6370 (660M) / NP9130 (670M) |
| 1080p, ultra settings, 2xAA at least | I5/I7+GT 650M | HP dv4t (external screen), HP dv6t, Sager NP6165/75 |
| 1080p, high to ultra settings, no AA | Our under 800$ recommendations | |
If you want more specific suggestions, please ask in the forums.
Skyrim on 1600×900 or 1680×1050
- Playing Skyrim smoothly on 900p resolution and high settings with no AA filtering is possible with dual-core I7 and Radeon 6630M, meaning that the 6650M / 7670M and up will be great for such settings with an I5/I7 and with the 6750M/6770M you’ll get almost top performance.
- Playing smoothly Skyrim on 1680×1050 with high settings and 4xMSAA is possible with the desktop part GT 640 which is like an OC’ed GT 650M DDR3. That means that the GT 650M will be probably great for 900p with 4xMSAA.
- Another benchmark from TH shows that you can run Skyrim with Radeon 6670 (which is an OC’ed Radeon 6770M) on 1680×1050 resolution smoothly including 8xAF and 2xMSAA. That’s done with much faster cpu compared to the typical laptops CPUs, but the resolution is also higher than 900p and it means that 6770M/7690M will be very good for 900p with some fast enough CPU (I5) and no AF.
Skyrim on 1366×768
Well, doesn’t really need much.
For 1366×768 with high preset and 8xAA you can use the Radeon 6750/6770M or GT 555M / GT 635M / GT 640M level cards that will give you around 30 FPS. Lowering the settings to 4xAA or 2xAA will result in much higher performance.
If you just want to play and save money, then 7670M / 6750M / GT 540M / GT 630M laptops will be great for medium-high settings, depends on the combination. Even the AMD Trinity 7660G integrated GPU will do you the honor medium settings. That can be achieved with 400$-600$ gaming laptops. See recommendations or ask in the forums.
