about oblivion for pc
Location: Forum - Games - about oblivion for pc
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Author: Soap Merchant
hey whos played this on pc yet?
User type: Standard User
Posts: 82
Date: June 21, 2006, 4:28 p.m.
I have, its considered to be the most graphically amazeing game this year.
go here to check out a review.
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/theelderscrollsivoblivion/review.html
also an interesting develpoment, is the physics card which may well be supported by oblivion in a future patch at some stage.
go here to read about this.
http://www.ageia.com/
the idea behind this card is that it takes a load off the graphics card and handles the physics side of it but also improves them because it is hardware solution.
so you get much greatly enhanced and improved physics and extra fps (frames per second) which is extremely critical if you are gameing over the net. Ofcourse also to make the game run smoother and obtain higher detail settings without major compromises. -
Author: robvdl
Hey, Oblivion is a really awesome game, after completing Morrowind, I could hardly wait for it's successor, Oblivion to come out myself.
User type: Administrator
Posts: 130
Date: June 21, 2006, 5:06 p.m.
I love my RPG's, especially the Elder Scrolls series.
Been playing it quite a bit over the last couple of months, it's pretty awesome, I'm a level 26 paladin at the moment and own 8 houses. You can even become a vampire too...
Like you said, Oblivion is really graphics intensive, If you don't have a Shader Model 3.0 graphics card (in other words GeForce 6, 7, or late model Radeon), it runs very slow.
I only have a GeForce FX 5600 myself (Geforce 5
), and it ran pretty slow initially, I even have my card water cooled and overclocked. However, I have learned a few tricks on how to speed the game up...
If you have an NVidia graphics card, get the latest drivers, and get the coolbits registry patch, this simply unlocks the overclocking tab, as well as another tab on the nvidia drivers, with the option "Direct3D max frames to render ahead", need to set this from 3 to 0, makes a huuuge diff. Don't overclock your card though, unless you really know what you're doing.
Another thing you can do (this is for all cards), is get Oldblivion. What this program does is start Oblivion with a special little DLL file running in the background, which constantly translates the graphics from Shader Model 3.0 to Shader Model 2.0, sounds tedious, but it does make a huge difference, I could actually play it at a respectable frame rate now.
As for optimising the game even more, just turn off the grass, it still looks ok without it. At least I can now run all sliders on max (without using grass), at 800x600, which for a GeForce 5600, being a few years old now is pretty good!
Yes, I have read about the PhysX card, which does in game physics processing, taking load of your CPU. Can't really afford one though, lol. Next on my books would have to be a new Motherboard, CPU, RAM and Video card, ouch! my P4 2.8 is aging. -
Author: robvdl
Some more info about PhysX...
User type: Administrator
Posts: 130
Date: June 22, 2006, 2:06 a.m.
There's news that Microsoft are going to add a new unified physics processing API to the upcoming version of DirectX. That means one API that game developers can use to handle physics processing, that will work with ATI, NVIDIA and Ageia hardware physics solutions.
If it's going to be in the next version of DirectX, they must mean DirectX 10. Now off course DirectX 10 will be Windows Vista only, as DirectX 10 is designed around the new graphics driver interface and 3D GUI that is part of the Windows Vista core, and can't be back ported to previous versions of Windows.
So it will be a bit of a bummer for Windows XP users, but then again, DirectX 10 is looking really good, it has been rewritten from ground up, redesigned from the core for speed, it's not even backwards compatible with DirectX 9 anymore for that reason. What M$ are doing in Windows Vista is supplying TWO versions of DirectX, DirectX 10 for newer games, and DirectX 9/8/7 for older (legacy) games!
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=2946 -
Author: Soap Merchant
Thats a pretty cool development concerning vista. The fact they are supplying two types of directx's.
User type: Standard User
Posts: 82
Date: June 22, 2006, 3:53 a.m.
So vista is really gonna blow the socks off winxp?
But with that said what kinda powerhouse machine are you gonna need to run it?
Is it gonna be like trying to run oblivion even on a good machine by todays standards? if and when i buy it i dont wanna find i have to tweak to max just to get it runing properly. Should start up a seperate thread on this subject (vista)
It is very relevant and current, and im sure will draw alot of attention as more people come to this website and forum.
Comeon, all you wainui computer professionals, get on here and start talking. Their must be more of us out their. lol. -
Author: robvdl
Check the Internet section of the forum, as you asked, I have done a massive big writeup on my knowledge of Windows Vista!
User type: Administrator
Posts: 130
Date: June 22, 2006, 3:53 p.m. -
Author: Soap Merchant
Their are some replacement textures for oblivion of a higher quality and i think it allows the game to run better (maybe faster too)
User type: Standard User
Posts: 82
Date: June 23, 2006, 5:36 a.m.
Im going to bed soon, and are to tired to try and find them again. But will post the appropriate links when im online again later on today.
But beware the textures are LARGE. So all those on 56k you have been warned.
But as far as i know they are worth it.
I also know of a GOOD oblivion tweak guide that goes totally indepth and devels right into the ini file its self.
I have used this guide and got good results for speed improvement with little graphical compromise.
i will get back to this one, unless rob beats me to it lol. -
Author: robvdl
Yeah, I've got it bookmarked still,
User type: Administrator
Posts: 130
Date: June 23, 2006, 9:50 p.m.
It's a distance texture LOD (Level Of Detail) MOD. In other words, the distance textures look a lot more detailed if this MOD is installed. By default Oblivion looks really good, except that distant mountains are a little bit blurry and low in detail. This MOD fixes that.
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/theelderscrollsivoblivion/download.html?sid=6148093 -
Author: Soap Merchant
ok ladys and gents. Heres the link for the tweak guide as promised for oblivion.
User type: Standard User
Posts: 82
Date: June 24, 2006, 1:20 a.m.
http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_1.html
do all this things in here that you consider relevant for your pc setup.
Considering your graphics card and how much ram, stuff like that.
Dont go crazy tweaking everything all in one go. just do a few at a time and see what difference if any that has made.
and heres the textures i was talking about.
http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_4.html
These are really all mods, but good ones.
You have to go down page to mod section.
high resolution, landscape LOD replacement pack (325 MB)
thats what is was meaning by large downloads. lol.
enjoy, and good luck, i remember i got a good speed gain outta some of this advice on the guide.
also should look for a good system tweak guide if serious about squeezing every last possible bit of speed for the game outta machine. I also have yet another usefull little tweak i found in a forum but no longer have the page. It is a tweak related to system, but very good for oblivion. It is to do with system idle process.
You wont beleive this till you try it but i reckon i got atleast a 50-100% speed increase whenever i ran this little button it installed in my start menu. It was a batch file that simply installed the process function onto my start menu.
I will search for the forum i found it in. One of most amazeing tweaks ive ever seen. -
Author: robvdl
I found this link to be a really good guide when playing Oblivion or any of the older Elder Scrolls games, such as Morrowind:
User type: Administrator
Posts: 130
Date: July 10, 2006, 2:01 p.m.
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page
It's got tips and guides for all the Elder Scroll games, even including the original "Arena" and "Daggerfall" games
. I even found out that the original, "Arena" is now free to download, weighing in just over 8mb, OMG ! Considering Morrowind was 680Mb and Oblivion is 4.3Gb, games have changed a lot...
