All this doom and gloom about having to upgrade pc's to play oblivion seems a bit out of place. at the moment i'm playing it with pretty much all settings on high and AA x2 (No HDR turned on though) on a 9800XT and its running great!! i was actually surprised how well its coping! i am going to get a 7800GS to tide me over until the switch to pci express but theres not as much of a rush now with good aul 9800XT holding it own.
nope at 1280x1024 (my lcd's max resolution) i couldnt believe how well its playing - even outdoors!!!
ok, what sort of frame rate are you getting? maybe you could install ati tray tools to see? i only get 20-30 fps with everything on full with hdr at 1680x1050. and thats with a amd64 and x1800xt
i havent actually checked the FPS cause its been playing so well but i will when i get home! its pretty smooth anyway. you dont need 60 Frames Per Second for an RPG...do you find its lagging on your system? p.s. do you have HDR/AA on? the only thing i've got turned off is self shadows (and HDR obviously)
you cant have AA and HDR with oblivion so i disabled AA with it. it slows right down to about 20fps in areas with lots of detail on. in the sewers it ran about 60fps or so. its averaging about 35fps though but its the dips that are doing my head in
Did you try playing with bloom instead of HDR (I know it is a totally inferior effect but it should increase your performance) I cannot wait to get the 7800GS and get HDR running! when I'm outside there are times when it pauses for a second or two if there's lots of trees grass lightening wolf or whatever going on but it doesn't really bother me considering I didn't think I'd get this sort of performance out of the 9800XT. I should mention that so far I have not encountered more than two enemies at any one time yet so that will probably knock my fps right back
ive not figured out how to get back into the initial gfx setup options. ive only had a quick go on it you see, not invested serious time by any means.
I was quite impressed about my pc handling oblivion on 1280*1024 WITH HDR and everything on max... I only turned off some shadows and set the tree detail to medium and it runs perfectly smooth even in the forrest(or at least it "feels" smooth)! I almost went out and spend 700-800€ for a new GPU and mobo
Seems most unpossible to me, seeing that my 6800GT is more or less unplayable at those settings but at the step up from 1024x768 (1160 something). For now I've applied some tweaks and run 1680x1050 with no hdr/bloom/aa and it's still better than it was but doesn't look nearly as good. I kinda half-plan to get a new graphics card (7900gt) but they still don't exist en masse from what I can tell. I could cope with it if mouse movement wasn't so directly tied with framerate... trying to do that persuasion minigame at 15fps wouldn't be a problem if you could acually move your mouse.
My system won't run Oblivion at max settings, with HDR @1024x768 very well. I have to turn most of the sliders down to medium/low to get a truely smooth game (as in outside) ie 30fps+ Inside it flies but i can't stand my fps dropping into the 20's!! OP: Don't bother with the 7800GS as it is no better than a 6800 Ultra. Infact even the 6800GT matches it in most games. It's nowhere near 7800GT performance. Gohere for some benchmarks. I'd be inclined to hold on to your 9800XT, which is as good as a 6600GT mostly, or get yourself a second-hand 6800GT if you must upgrade now, and clock it. Most goto Ultra speeds without to much fuss.
running 1164xwadeva with HDR and max settings with shadows turned way down on a soft modded 6800. a little jerky sometimes but playable. waiting for the 7900GT...
Yup the 7800GS is a bit of a rip-off, given the diffs in price going for a 6800GT makes far too much sense. Of course if HDR is really your thing then the 7800GS should pull away quite decently but outside that they are close in performance. If your P4 is LGA775 you could consider upgrading to a new PCI-E mobo and then nab yourself a 7900GT PCI-E for a similar price to the 7800GS AGP without even having to change your CPU. Alternatively you could look to a 7600GT or 7800GT, they're better and cheaper than 7800GS.
For those with ATI cards i nthe x1000 series you can actually have HDR and AA on at the same time Stupidly Oblivion doesnt allow it unlike other games such as Counter-Strike Soruce (totally amazing with HDR and 6x AA at 1680x1050 ), however you can use the CCC or another program to force AA then just use HDR in-game and you'll have both
or use chucks driver thing from ATI's website http://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&questionID=21960
That seems pretty good! Even my PC wont run oblivion that well Nothing will run it on max with over 30-40 fps to this day!
I think HDR is a major killer in this game, and then theres just some weird randomness in variations of performance due to the game being really poorly coded. I have a considerably more modern and more powerfull system then the OP(6800GS, 2.5Ghz oppie/2GB) and I wouldn't saym Oblivion runs great by any stretch of the word in 1280x1024. It runs just well enough for it to be workable, and thats with shadows and grass off. The only thing that could really be causing that much death to my FPS is HDR. Highly tempted to leave it off forever tbh.
Yeah, its way random. I came out of a cave into the outdoors with grass and animals and the fps went down to like 5-10 :/
I've just paid £195 ($330) for a 7800GS from Best Buy (when I was on my recent hols in Florida) to replace my 6800GT (128MB version) and it has been well worth it. 3DMark05 reckons it's about 35% faster and this is born out in Oblvion. Obviously the difference would be less pronounced compared to 256MB 6800GT, but given that I have a 3.06GHz P4 (S478), it's a good upgrade route and will keep me going until next Jan when I build a rig from scratch. In fact, bearing in mind it's a Dell, it's my only upgrade route - a 256Mb 6800GT or GS wouldn't have been enough of an improvement to justify the outlay.
