The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim is still one of the most popular titles on Steam. A YouTuber who specializes in games is now showing what can be achieved with the aging RPG.
The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim is arguably one of the most well-known role-playing games on Steam and console. However, the game is now about 12 years old and has aged accordingly. You can see this in the graphics as well.
The YouTuber “Digital Dreams” has now demonstrated in his video how much can still be extracted from Skyrim. And it is truly impressive.
Skyrim looks almost like a new game
What did the YouTuber do? The YouTuber took the Special Edition of Skyrim and prepared some settings for it. To achieve this, he installed Raytraced Global Illumination from ReShade and uses an ENB preset for Skyrim.
ENB is a post-processing suite developed and maintained by Boris Voronstov. ENB adds many enhancements and features to games that are not available in the original game. As a result, games look significantly more polished. This includes better color filters, more natural lighting, and finer detail adjustments.
In total, he is said to have installed around 1,000 mods to make the game look so good (via wccftech.com). He has adjusted graphics, sound, and weather effects. And it’s worth it. Because in his video, Skyrim looks like a next (or next-next) generation game. Pay attention to small details like the reflection of buildings and plants in the water.
However, it is not perfect and the game still shows its age. For example, in the movement animations of the people at 0:28 in the video, where the soldier jerks down the stairs or the running motion of the child looks not very fluid.
Can this be replicated? Those who want to replicate the YouTuber’s version of Skyrim can do so easily, as all mods and software are freely available. The problem, however, is that you need a powerful computer to handle the graphics improvements.
The YouTuber “Digital Dreams” uses around a Ryzen 9 7950 and an RTX 4090 in his system, which is top-class hardware that costs a lot of money. For an RTX 4090, you currently pay according to Geizhals.de from 1,900 euros upwards.
At least for the graphics, you don’t need an Nvidia graphics card and can just as well use an AMD graphics card, as the used ray tracing effects should also work with an AMD GPU.
Sometimes, however, you can also get lucky when buying a graphics card. For instance, a gamer managed to snag an RTX 4090 for less than 1,000 euros. How he did that and what tricks were needed, you can read directly on MeinMMO:
A gamer gets lucky and buys an RTX 4090 for 913 euros with a trick on Amazon – How did he do it?
