Wait I had this problem too. I had intergrated sound and the footsteps would slow me to a crawl. Rats would kill me...go figure. It was a slideshow.

Then I installed my SB live and it ran fine since it was an actual soundcard (not sure why your card is acting up still). That mod fixes it but removes the sounds of footsteps. If you want the sounds try lowering sound acceleration to basic and see if it changes. The sound itself may be disgusting though. So yeah, it is bloody annoying. Humanoids aren't affected it seems, only beasts etc.

I'm planning to buy this game but I gotta ask first; will it run well with the following specs (or is it time to buy an XBox360)?

AMD Turion64 ML-34
ATI Mobility Radeon x700 128MB, PCI-Express.

It's a laptop as you can see. I don't demand the best performance the game can muster, just good enough to play.

It won't play incredibly well on that card. It will play but bare minimum IMHO. You would have to tweak the game for about a week and lose some serious eye-candy in the process.

Thanks! Perhaps I should buy an XBox 360 then.

I don't understand. I'm running a motherboard and video card one generation under yours and I don't have these problems.

Athlon64 X2 4400+ > Intel 3200+
256MB GeForce 7900GT > 512MB GeForce 6800 (AGP Bus)
Asus A8N-SLI Premium > Asus P4P800 SE
2GB Crucial DDR RAM > 1.5 GB DDR RAM
Windows 2000 -- Windows XP Home Edition

Except for video memory, you're bigger and better.

Thanks Draconis, it's good to have a solid comparison like that. Do you get no slowdown whatsoever?

My animal footstep noise slowdown is all fixed, but I still do get slowdowns during fight scenes and heavy forest scenes also cause it.

I wish my XP cd still worked - I'm starting to wonder whether 2000 isn't making full use of the modern hardware.

I also read a thorough comparison of Oblivion performance between 256MB and 512MB gfx cards and the upshot was that it shouldn't be making a difference as severe as this and performance would only increase in ultra complex areas at high res. I'm only running at 1280x1024 which (relatively speaking anyway!) isn't that high.

[ 04-25-2006, 07:16 PM: Message edited by: shamrock_uk ]

I have tweaked the crap out of mine if you need any tips. I am running a 6800 and I get a stable FPS 99% of the time. What settings are you using on thw video menu exactly (not the ini. just the main menu) and we could work from there. There are also one or two 'magic' tweaks that improve performance slightly without having an image hit (or having s small image hit).

Are you using some sort of sound card DR? If so, that would explain it ;)

Win2000 should not cause problems on its own, but unfortunantly it is limited by what it can do, not only that, but the drivers/apps designed for it are different from the Winxp ones.

And you are correct about the video cards, having more on board ram wont make the game run smoother, but will allow for more to be loaded at a time and can allow you to put bigger textures in there with no performance hit [img]smile.gif[/img]

But yeah, if you have a high end card and your only running 1280x1024, you should not have a problem installing the texture packs

I use this texture one too, since the games original texture pack is fugly. I have 0 problems using it and it caused no fps hit at all on a 256mb card.