UESP Forums

Performance tuning

The Elder Scrolls games were notorious for their high system requirements at the time. As emulation is always considerably slower than the real thing, a very fast computer is definitely recommended---especially for Battlespire and Redguard, as they were high-resolution games.

For those for whom DOSBox is not running as fast as it perhaps should, below are various tips on how to speed up DOSBox or the relevant game, many through edits to dosbox.conf. Said tips become progressively more extreme in terms of compromise for those who really need the extra speed boost.

Enable the dynamic core explicitly by changing core=auto to core=dynamic.
Close as much software running in background as possible so that DOSBox has at its disposal as much processing power as possible.
Play in full-screen. DOSBox performs various optimizations in full-screen mode which are impossible in a window.
Enable full-screen double buffering. Change fulldouble=false to fulldouble=true.
Play from CD images instead of physical discs if experiencing periodic hanging. DOS games would often rely upon the slower speeds and trivial spin-up times of the drives of the day, accessing game data from disc more often than modern drives are designed to cope with.
Arena and Daggerfall both include a detail slider which decreases the draw distance. Turning detail down to its lowest will have a considerable impact on performance.
You may wish to manually tweak the cycles (processing power) which DOSBox attempts to emulate. Start with cycles at a fairly high number (eg. cycles=8000) and press Ctrl-F12 to increase the number of cycles, repeating until either the game runs sufficiently smoothly or DOSBox starts to use 100% CPU in the Windows Task Manager processes tab. Ctrl-F11 can also be used to decrease the cycle count if necessary. On particularly slow machines, cycles=max may yield best results.
Enable frame skipping: change frameskip=0 to a higher value, starting low. More skipped frames equates to much less work for DOSBox, at the cost of jerkier video.
In extreme cases you can reconfigure the game to play without sound or music and disable SoundBlaster emulation in DOSBox (sbtype=none).