Jerykk wrote on Dec 8, 2011, 12:27:

Complaining that the game does not work on hardware running outside its default spec? People actually do this?

So Skyrim's official minimum CPU requirement is a 4 GHz CPU? Please. The game was designed for X360. No port should ever require a 4 GHz CPU as the consoles are using 6-year-old hardware. As I mentioned earlier, the inconsistent results seem to suggest that clock speed isn't the only issue here. It may also boil down to CPU type. The only other player in this thread with a C2Q also mentioned having the same performance issues as myself. The patch itself claims to have optimized performance for C2D CPUs. I'm not sure what further evidence you need that the game does not perform equally on all CPUs, even ones running at the same clock speed.

If you can run the game without issue, that's great. Good for you. It doesn't mean that your experience is universal, nor does it mean that people suffering issues have insufficient hardware. The game is very clearly CPU-bound. I tried dropping the resolution down to 720p and disabling AA and AF and I got no performance boost. In fact, lowering the detail settings made no difference, except for shadows and object draw distance. I got a significant boost dropping shadows from Ultra to High (but a negligible boost dropping from High to Low) and dropping object draw distance from max to min. Those are the only settings that made any difference. I get better performance in Witcher 2 and graphically, that game is significantly more demanding than Skyrim.