Should I continue playing?

[Jintor]

OK, let's get this straight: Oblivion is freaking awesome.

The problem is my hardware. I've got... pretty much the bare minimum. Now it doesn't quite run like a laggy horse but it's quite close. The more people there are, the laggier it is. The more people *fighting* there are, the laggier it is. Actually, it's almost fine as long as there is nothing fighting and no flickering light sources around (fire... Kvatch was very very nearly unplayable).

So the game itself is fun. But combat is not fun. One of the reasons I got Oblivion was because the combat actually worked, as opposed to Morrowind where it worked but only worked behind the scenes. So, I've got a brilliant game, but I quite dread anything involving combat.

Should i continue playing, or wait the uncertain months until i get an upgrade of awesomeness?

 

[Warbie]

I'd wait. If you're anything like me, you'll end up getting so annoyed with performance that you'll end up disliking the game.

 

[Steven]

Do you have oldblivion?

 

[VirusType2]

First I would see what kind of performance I could get from lowering things like V sync, shadows, and set view distance about half way. If you've already done that you can try lowering grass which has a big impact. If you don't have alot of RAM then cutting back the texture size will make an improvement. Try 800x600 resoultion and make sure anti-aliasing and anistrophy are turned off - they aren't nearly as important as things like texture size and shadows, and if you had to turn those down then you definately can't afford to run luxuries like anti-aliasing. There are plenty of things you could sacrifice - some of them you may not really miss, so long as you can play the game smoothly. Check Tweakguides.

I've got it running pretty smooth with a 9250 PCI card - if your PC meets game requirements, then your PC is at least 8 times more powerful than mine and you should have plenty of power if you choose to use oldblivion shaders like TheSteven is talking about. Problem is there are a few issues with them but you could get 110fps (I think thats possibly the default FrameRate maximum Cap) using them and they look really good. Anything over 35fps is going to look pretty smooth and 72fps and higher is like liquid.

I've posted screenshots on the 3rd page of "If you think your PC can run this game check this out" thread, so you can see it still looks good - it's no screenshots for the game box cover, but but it looks really sweet anyway, and sometimes I just stand there and stare at the graphics.

If worse comes to worse type tlb in the console and it will run 3x better, although it won't look nearly as nice as it should.

Personally, I'd still play this game if it looked worse than morrowind, it's just such a phenomenal game you shouldn't miss out on. Eventually when you get a new PC it will look like a brand new game anyway, and you can play through it again.

I guess I'm just greatefull to play it. It's so much fun that I wouldn't care if it looked bad. I bought the game and it just wouldn't run, weeks later, a couple of coders made a patch to make the game use 1.1 shaders, and now I can play it - So, I guess I appreciate the game more.

 

[Dynasty]

Oblivion is an example of a game ive been having problems with recently. I cant remember the last game i had to fiddle with the settings so much to get a balance between performance and looks.

I like my games to run fairly playably smooth and still have me in awe at how good it looks. HL2 for instance. Perfectly smooth and gorgeous.

Honestly, id wait. Its so worth it, and Oblivion doesnt deserve to be played a few times and then put back on the shelf. Either play and dont stop, or dont play it until your system is upto the task.

You can just lower you specs obviously to make the game run better, but your dog's food will look better im betting. Reduce your viewing distance, and your shadows. That makes a BIG difference.

 

[CookieCuttah]

Ive tried many things and came to the conclusion that the problem isn't the graphics. (They aren't much better than half-life 2) The main problem is that it takes poor advantage of multiple proccesors so it ends up running bad for everyone. It's a game ment for high proccesing usage but usually the load doesn't go over 60% using dual proccesors. Ive virtually tried every proccesor tweak and sometimes it upped my fps up a bit. Video settings don't matter at all, max or minimum I get the same normally good but sometimes bad fps. It's a memory leak problem too, it goes from 50 to 30 fps all of a sudden some times.

 

[Jintor]

First I would see what kind of performance I could get from lowering things like V sync, shadows, and set view distance about half way. If you've already done that you can try lowering grass which has a big impact. If you don't have alot of RAM then cutting back the texture size will make an improvement. Try 800x600 resoultion and make sure anti-aliasing and anistrophy are turned off - they aren't nearly as important as things like texture size and shadows, and if you had to turn those down then you definately can't afford to run luxuries like anti-aliasing. There are plenty of things you could sacrifice - some of them you may not really miss, so long as you can play the game smoothly. Check Tweakguides.

I've got it running pretty smooth with a 9250 PCI card - if your PC meets game requirements, then your PC is at least 8 times more powerful than mine and you should have plenty of power if you choose to use oldblivion shaders like TheSteven is talking about. Problem is there are a few issues with them but you could get 110fps (I think thats possibly the default FrameRate maximum Cap) using them and they look really good. Anything over 35fps is going to look pretty smooth and 72fps and higher is like liquid.

I've posted screenshots on the 3rd page of "If you think your PC can run this game check this out" thread, so you can see it still looks good - it's no screenshots for the game box cover, but but it looks really sweet anyway, and sometimes I just stand there and stare at the graphics.

If worse comes to worse type tlb in the console and it will run 3x better, although it won't look nearly as nice as it should.

Personally, I'd still play this game if it looked worse than morrowind, it's just such a phenomenal game you shouldn't miss out on. Eventually when you get a new PC it will look like a brand new game anyway, and you can play through it again.

I guess I'm just greatefull to play it. It's so much fun that I wouldn't care if it looked bad. I bought the game and it just wouldn't run, weeks later, a couple of coders made a patch to make the game use 1.1 shaders, and now I can play it - So, I guess I appreciate the game more.

Any particular threads i should be checking out in this section for tweaks and whatnot? Any websites? I just want it to run well enough so that combat and sneaking isn't fraught with technical dangers. And that i can shoot my bow and arrows on the move and ACTUALLY HIT THINGS.

 

[CookieCuttah]

Ive tried many tweaking guides and supposed magic potions and the only thing I found that actually works is to turn the music off. That's the only considerable + ive experienced.

 

[VirusType2]

Ive tried many tweaking guides and supposed magic potions and the only thing I found that actually works is to turn the music off. That's the only considerable + ive experienced.

Really? Hmm, I have noticed it has been running worse since I recently turned it back on, but I had changed other things, so I didn't suspect it.


OK, well since you say that helps I'll let everyone know how turn off the game music (straight from tweakguides):

Turning down the volume in the Audio Options only lowers the volume, it doesn't turn it off. To turn it off go into the ini and put bMusicEnabled=0

The Oblivion.ini is located in My Documents/My Games/Oblivion

Open it with notepad or wordpad and scroll down until you find bMusicEnabled=1 and change it to a 0 and hit save.

 

[CookieCuttah]

Ive found another good tweak. Same steps, but you go down to.

[GethitShader]
fBlurAmmount=0.0000
fBlockedTexOffset=0.0000
fHitTexOffset=0.0000

Make them all like mine (0) and your combat will gain at least 5 fps. The blur is cool, but not that cool and it seems to smack my performance hard. It's the only effect that ive noticed doing any real damage. (Because I always wondered how combat would stall so much, after all it's only sword swinging.)

Edit: I have personally done a few hours of testing with fps in mind. Those two tweaks have produced largest results so far. What is good for memory, I can't tell you because to me that isn't a problem. But I have tried bloom+AA over HDR and lowering res, but nothing helps. Even when I look at walls in a city I still get the same fps as looking anywhere else. So that zones it in on a CPU problem ( I have tried all graphical improvements, none which work.) It seems nothing particular makes CPU run better but I boosted threads and turned all thread options on, it seems a bit better, but not the best. It does seem to stabilize the game a bit, but nothing that would hitch my performance directly.

 

[The Monkey]

I also got low per performances. The loading times are really long and they first-person weapons/shields models hardly work outside.

 

[Jintor]

Actually, Oldblivion works really really well - cept for the water and occasional screwups with certain spell effects, but at least I can actually fight now. I might even risk turning bloom on, or extending the draw distance! ><

Still want more RAM though. Can't go wrong with more RAM.

 

[VirusType2]

Actually, Oldblivion works really really well - cept for the water and occasional screwups with certain spell effects, but at least I can actually fight now. I might even risk turning bloom on, or extending the draw distance! ><

Still want more RAM though. Can't go wrong with more RAM.

Yea water is screwed up right now, and bloom doesn't work right now, also distant land is buggy and might need a special ini change to get to work, so keep that in mind. Shadows and blood decals aren't currently working either. It does work really well though, for the most part, and future versions will be much better. I get up to 60fps with my total POS computer.

Hopefully they can get the water to look at least as good as it did in Morrowind, which was pretty incredible IMO, especially the way the rain falling on the water created ripples.

 

[Jintor]

I saw it without Oblivion - it was pretty amazing, if horribly horribly laggy.

I was waiting for the Fence in Lleyowin (i think that's what it's called) to get to a zone where he would fence, and he walked over to a pond and stood in the water for 3 hours. ><