NVIDIA Releases Tweaking Guides for Trine 2 & Skyrim

When NVIDIA launched its GeForce.com website last fall, I wasn’t sure what to expect of it. I had assumed it’d compete with AMD’s very similar Game.AMD.com, but the two have come to be nothing alike. Whereas AMD’s site is more for keeping up-to-date on Radeon happenings, NVIDIA has gone the extra mile to produce high-quality tweaking and comparison guides that more often than not even prove useful for those using competitor products. Overall, I’ve been very impressed with NVIDIA’s efforts.

Last week, the company released two new tweaking guides, representing both Trine 2 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. That latter was a bit expected, but I admit it’s surprising to see NVIDIA taking the time to produce a guide for a $15 indie title. It’s well-deserved, however, as Trine 2 is one of the most graphically gorgeous titles to have ever graced the PC. And as seen in the article, it can also be rather system intensive.

Trine 2 is not CPU-dependant, so performance increases will only be seen with a faster graphics card. In the company’s tests, the minimum required GeForce 7600 is just that… a minimum. For Medium or High settings, a 8800 or 9800 could suffice, but to max things out, a much beefier GPU will be needed. On a GTX 580, the game at max detail ran at 55~60 FPS at 1080p.

For those with a 3D-enabled monitor, Trine 2 will take full advantage of it. There’s a video on the above-linked page that will allow you to test an image of the game both with and without 3D, so it’s worth checking if 3D is your goal.

While the Trine 2 guide packs a lot of information onto a single page, the Skyrim guide spans about twenty. Yes, I said 20. This game, while lacking DX9 support, offers a wide-range of tweaking options, and each one of them is detailed here, many with before/after examples. If you’re a Radeon user or someone who doesn’t even have interest in Skyrim, the guide is packed with useful information regarding game graphics, so it’s well worth checking out.

Going past simple in-game graphics tweaks, the guide also tackles .ini edits and even available mods that improve the look of the game – sometimes drastically. Skyrim might take a long time to “beat”, but it seems tweaking it could take about just as long!