RCRN – ATi AMD Radeon Tweak Guide for Skyrim

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On the web you can find tons of material about tweaking vga manufactured by Nvidia , but it’s pretty hard find something useful about how to twak AMD cards correctly, and the passiveness from AMD‘s side certainly doesn’t help either.

This guide will explain how to set your Ati-AMD VGA to make it work the best possible for Skyrim.

1. Latest Drivers:
Before doing everything i suggest you to update your card to the latest Beta drivers available, that is version 12.1a, you can find them on the AMD website to this LINK!

2. CCC Settings (Catalyst Control Center):
In order to open the CCC you have to right-click on desktop and choose the voice Catalyst Control Center from the dropdown menu.

For first is necessary create a new driver profile only for Skyrim, this way the new settings will be initialized only when you run Skyrim.
To create a new profile find the option “Gaming” from the sidebar, click on it and then choose “3D Application Settings“, after clicking on it a list with all the options available will pop out, before doing anything you have to look for “Application Profiles” and select << New Application >> then click save, and from the window that will appear you need to select the Skyrim’s executable, TESV.exe!

After doing this we can go straight through the analysis of the CCC Options:

AA – Antialiasing:
In order to improve the AA with Skyrim you have to disable “Use Application Settings“, and you need to set the desired AA level directly via the slider, choose 2x if you have an old rig, 4x for medium rigs and 8x if you are using a great rig (at least 2gb of video memory).

The “Morphological filtering” setting enable/disable the AMD‘s FXAA-Like effect, it’s pretty invasive and not much optimized, use it only if you don’t mind too much about heavy text fuzziness.
AF – Anisotropic Filtering:
The AF quality provided by CCC is really better than the standard AF included inSkyrim, so un-tick “Use Application Settings” and set the AF slider to 16x, the maximum value, the fps drop is minimal, and the improvement in texture quality is really huge also on rigs not so recent


Tessellation:
This checkbox is active only if your VGA can handle this technology, if it can set it to “AMD Optimized“.




Catalyst AI:
Values defined here are concerning the global graphics performance, i suggest you set this (whatever your graphics card is) to “High Quality” and tick the checkbox “Enable Surface Format Optimization” that can boost your Skyrim performances a little.



Mipmap detail level:
Here the texture scaling quality is managed, set it to “High Quality” without thinking too much about it.





Wait for vertical refresh:
Ignore this and set it to “Off, unless application specifies“, you can enable/disable v-sync via the Skyrim ini.



Anti-Aliasing Mode:
Here is defined what Antialiasing type will be used, if you are using a mid-high rig set it to “Super-sample AA“. In case you are using a mid-low rig set the slider to Performance (“Multi-sample AA“)

3. Skyrim Options:
After setting the Catalyst Control Center, let’s discover how we need setting the Skyrim options.
To find them you have to run the Skyrim‘s Launcher and click on Options.

Here you have to set the mirror value of the AA and AF setting selected on the CCC, for example if you set AF 16x and AA 8x into the driver panel, you have to set the same Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filter values into the Skyrim Options .

This thing is really important, and is necessary, because with the latest Skyrim patch only using the forced values without also having set the same values in the in-game options won’t work properly.

In order to enable the FXAA you have to tick the FXAA option in the Advanced tab, remember that the RCRN‘s FXAA is optimized to work together with the one built in Skyrim, but if you want gain some fps without a big loss in image quality, you can disable the in-game FXAA and only keep active the one provided by RCRN, whiich is less of a performance hog!

4. VGA Presets:
Here are some premade options for AMD cards, they cover almost every rig, anyway you can customize them as you wish, they only offer you a guideline.

Ultra: Suggested only for very powerful rigs, this is the best graphics setting that Skyrim can handle, this preset has also been used to take the RCRN’s screenshots.
Catalyst Control Center:
Antialiasing: AA 8x – (Morphological filtering: ON)
Anisotropic Filtering: AF 16x
Tessellation: AMD Optimized
Catalyst A.I.: High Quality – (Enable Surface Format Optimization: ON)
Mipmap detail level: High Quality
Antialiasing Mode: Super-sample AA
Skyrim:
Antialiasing: AA 8x
Anisotropic Filtering: AF 16x
Detail: Ultra
- Advanced: FXAA ON
RCRN:
FXAA: ON

Medium-High: suggested for medium-high rigs, great graphics and acceptable framerate.
Catalyst Control Center:
Antialiasing: AA 4x – (Morphological filtering: OFF)
Anisotropic Filtering: AF 16x
Tessellation: AMD Optimized
Catalyst A.I.: High Quality – (Enable Surface Format Optimization: ON)
Mipmap detail level: High Quality
Antialiasing Mode: Super-sample AA
Skyrim:
Antialiasing: AA 4x
Anisotropic Filtering: AF 16x
Detail: Ultra
- Advanced: FXAA OFF
RCRN:
FXAA: ON

Low-Medium: suggested for not-so-powerful rigs, but still decent
Catalyst Control Center:
Antialiasing: AA 2x – (Morphological filtering: OFF)
Anisotropic Filtering: AF 16x
Tessellation: AMD Optimized
Catalyst A.I.: High Quality – (Enable Surface Format Optimization: ON)
Mipmap detail level: High Quality
Antialiasing Mode: Multi-sample AA
Skyrim:
Antialiasing: AA 2x
Anisotropic Filtering: AF 16x
Detail: High/Ultra
- Advanced: FXAA OFF
RCRN:
FXAA: ON

Low: suggested if you are trying to run skyrim in your microwave oven
Catalyst Control Center:
Antialiasing: “use application settings” – (Morphological filtering: OFF)
Anisotropic Filtering: AF 16x
Tessellation: AMD Optimized
Catalyst A.I.: High Quality – (Enable Surface Format Optimization: ON)
Mipmap detail level: High Quality
Antialiasing Mode: “use application settings”
Skyrim:
Antialiasing: OFF
Anisotropic Filtering: AF 16x
Detail: Medium/High
- Advanced: FXAA OFF
RCRN:
FXAA: ON

5. Notes:
The content of this guide is purely informative, take it as it is, and tweak your rig in relation to what you are looking for.
If you are using the “Ultra” preset listed previously i suggest you to check your temperatures frequently, the vga can become very stressed by it!
If you are using an overclocked system, before playing check if it is absolutely rock-solid!

Happy Tweaking!

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