this is a site, recommended by bethsoft, that tests your setup readiness for oblivion. [img]smile.gif[/img]

http://www.srtest.com/referrer/srtest

choose "The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion" from the dropdown menu and let it test your pc. there will be a short wait while it downloads and analyzes your system. then you should see 2 tabs: "Minimum" and "Recommended". it should point out your system's weak points which i found to be pretty helpful.

just be aware that if you click on the "We Recommend" buttons, they'll send you to NewEgg or somesuch place to spend your dough on what they recommend. besides that obvious bit of marketing, i found the analysis to be pretty helpful.

V***V

[ 03-24-2006, 04:38 PM: Message edited by: Luvian ]

Spyware.

what makes you say that? according to spybot s&d and ad-aware, i was clean before using it and clean afterwards.
the mods at the official TES boards are recommending this program. if it is spyware, like you say, tell me what exactly it's doing that i've missed.

thanks. [img]smile.gif[/img]

V***V

According to that site, everything in my current system is ok except for the video card (128mb radeon 9200). The only surprise was my processor speed which, although only 1.8ghz, is rated at 2.5ghz?.. Are they making allowances for overclocking?

Not a bad site.

Its rated at 2.5ghz because of your processor type. For example, my AMD processor that is considered 2.12ghz is actually considered somewhere around 2.8ghz when comparing with the recommended 3.0ghz Intel processor. Certain processors may seem considerably lower in speed just by the numbers, but that isn't the real case. I don't know where the difference in speeds came up, or why it does, but different processor types have their own measuring system for power it seems.

It appears I need a new processor and video card, probably a new motherboard to allow a new processor as well. Yeah, I need to get my dirty little hadns on some major cash.

I pass the test. :D
The little Green graph bar on top of test page Blows
completely off the Graph scale. Below that it says:

"Congratulations,your system will rock this Product!
Wish we had a system that hot you lucky dog!"

Never ever had that said to me before about any computer. :D

CPU
Minimum: Pentium 4 or Athlon XP or better
You Have: 2 processors running - Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 3.00GHz
PASS
CPU Speed
Minimum: 2 GHz
You Have: 3.0 GHz
PASS
System RAM
Minimum: 512 MB
You Have: 2.0 GB
PASS
Operating System
Minimum: Windows 2000/XP/XP 64-bit
You Have: Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 (Build 2600)
PASS
Video Card
Minimum: 128MB Direct3D compatible video card (NVIDIA GeForce FX+ / ATI Radeon 9500+)
You Have: RADEON X1600 Series (Radeon X1600 Series (0x71C0))
PASS
Video Card Features - Minimum attributes of your Video Card

Video RAM: Required - 128 MB , You have - 256.0 MB
Video Card 3D Acceleration: Required - Yes , You have - Yes
Video HW Transform & Lighting: Required - Yes , You have - Yes
Vertex Shader Ver.: Required - 2.0 , You have - 3.0
Pixel Shader Ver.: Required - 2.0 , You have - 3.0

Video Card Driver Version (DirectX)
Your driver version number is: 6.14.10.
manufacturer.
DirectX Version
Minimum: DirectX 9.0c (included on disk)
You Have: 9.0c
PASS
Sound Card
Minimum: Yes
You Have: SoundMAX 7.1 Integrated Digital HD Audio
PASS
Sound Card Driver Version
Your driver version number is: 5.10.1.4100
Free Disk Space
Minimum: 4.6 GB
You Have: 212.3 GB
PASS
DVD
Minimum: 8X DVD-Rom
You Have: PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-111D
PASS, but the Speed could NOT be analyzed.

[ 03-18-2006, 10:31 AM: Message edited by: TheCrimsomBlade ]

Well, I passed the sound card requirement.

Guess I'll have to wait until I can afford a new computer.

I failed. I failed when Morrowind came out, too. Seems these guys always hit me at the ebb of one of my upgrade cycles.

This time it's not too bad. Add a DVD-ROM and I'm fine at minimum. At 512K RAM and a GeForce 6800/ATI X800 or better video card and I'm fine and dandy.

Welp, I failed. Thanks for posting this so I know in advance. I remember Daggerfall. My computer met specs but dang, it load, crash, load, crash... I don't want to ever put myself through that again. I just refuse to buy a new computer just so I can play a game. I've done it before, but those days are over. It's a different economy out there now. [img]tongue.gif[/img]

hmmm...ok I didnt pass
maybe Ill just borrow the game from a friend and test it before I buy it.

Does anyone have a good tip where I can find cheap grafic-cards in scandinavia, prefrably sweden?

I meet the minimum requirements, a smidgeon off recommended (I can't believe how much ram I have!! I thought I had 512 but turns out I have double that! :eek: ). The only thing I don't meet recommended requirements on is the video card - I have a RADEON X300 SE apparently. It meets minimum requirements but not recommended - any ideas as to how this will affect my game if (okay, when ;) ) I get it?

Sorry Aelia - you will really struggle to play the game on the X300SE. It has very little memory bandwidth which will pretty much limit you to running 640x480 and its low pixel fill rate/polygon throughput will mean pretty much everything will have to be set to minimum, and even then you'll probably have you FPS in the single digits, perhaps teens at best (especially outside). It's not the way to enjoy such a beautiful game :( . If you wanted some suggestions as to some good value cards that would vastly improve your Oblivion performance just shout.

Just to give you a resonable reference point, the following screenshot is from quite a powersul system, but with a Radeon 9600 pro graphics card (similar polygon throughput and fillrate, but it has 3 times the memory bandwidth over the X300SE!) - everything was set to low, and resolution was 640x480 - even when it's not really rendering anything at all the FPS never gets out the 20's :(

http://home.planet.nl/~post0417/FM/omg_coding.JPG

Damn. Well it seems like video cards aren't terribly expensive so I might buy a new one - what would be good? I don't necessarily want the absolute best I can get, maybe one that will last me a few years before it is totally obsolete?

A "usable" video card may range in cost from the $80 price area your X300 is in, all the way to $500 or so (not sure) for the current king of the mountain X1900XT VGA. Personally, I would suggest going ahead to bite the bullet and get a card that will last for awhile, at least mid-range, around $200. For AGP, the 6800GS is sitting on the spot of maximum capability/ speed per dollar that the 6600 GT held for so long, and the Radeon 9600 Pro had fit into before the 6600 GT came along.

The Geforce 6600 and X700 will cover the basics (and perhaps a little beyond that) for Oblivion, but I would rate those two as marginal for the purpose, and too likely to need still another upgrade within perhaps a year, as a result of being minimally acceptable today. I'd move up the chain a notch, at least, to X700 Pro, and 6600GT.

I'm not doing much with PCI-e so far, but I believe that there is a 6800 GS for that interface as well. The various X800's are slightly less capable, but also slightly less expensive than a 6800 GS; you can find models in both AGP and PCI-e that will do the job now, and still be useful a couple of years from now.

Incidentally, I visited that evaluation site when the 3-20 release date first became official, and used a PC running Windows 2000 Pro. That system failed the OS requirement at the time, but I installed Obivion anyway (however, in the interim, Bethesda had amended their official requirements at some point late in February, and included W2K as acceptable -- I'm sure they didn't change any code before changing the published requirement).


;)

[ 03-27-2006, 07:57 AM: Message edited by: The Kiwi ]

i have the x700 with 256 mb ram, and it's tested as FAILED on the srs test "recommended" level.
however, i'm playing at 1280x1024 with everything else on high with only v-sync disabled. the game looks great and runs very smooth. i'm happy with it.
oh yeah, i'm using omega drivers with it, too.

V***V

The Kiwi - some good info there [img]smile.gif[/img] .

Aelia - do you know if you need an AGP graphics card or PCI-E? Do you have an upper limit for budget? This will allow us to be a little mroe specific.

If it's an X700 "Pro", I can imagine that it could do so.
I suppose those are an ATI version of Catalyst or something? The Radeons I've had didn't have that, but I stayed away from ATI products for many years after an unhappy PC purchase of an Intel cpu and MB, with an ATI gpu that was incompatible with all the games I wanted to play at the time. I'll have a Radeon 9800 XT in my spare (in the BR) PC in a few days, and see how Oblivion runs on that (supposed to be a shade faster than an X700 Pro).

Meanwhile, I just made a bookmark for that test site, but the URL didn't work properly when I ran the one for War of the Ring II. When I'd previously used the link on the Bethesda site, there was no problem. (Of course, I did forget WHICH of my systems I use when surfing the Intenet. When I loaded IE6 instead of Mozilla, it worked, but found fault with the old net-surfing box!) I will hunt down Bethesda's link for comparison in a little bit. No luck on that, they seem to have removed it now!


B)

[ 03-27-2006, 08:36 AM: Message edited by: The Kiwi ]

kiwi...

the post is still there. it just got moved to the hardware & software issues forum.

this is the link to freddo's sticky

and the omega drivers i use on my ati card are third-party ones. they are made for both ati and nvidia cards. he's been making them, with help from devs at both companies, for over 3 or 4 years now.


btw, beautiful screenies!! i'm so glad i'm not the only one posting them now. :D

V***V

Thanks, Kiwi, for that info. I will definitely be appreciative of it when I do buy a new card - I find all the numbers and stuff quite confusing.

Actually though, I just bought the game anyway to see what it was like - so if it was completely unplayable, I would buy one then. In fact, it's really quite good! I am on low quality (lol it was very disheartening when you install and then go to play and it works out what level graphics you get and you get the rather blunt 'your graphics quality is set to low', like yeah, Bethesda, I know my card sucks you don't have to rub it in ;) ) so I can only imagine what high quality must look like, but I am pleasantly surprised! Certainly nothing like the screenshot Zink posted here of what I could expect. The only problem is that occasionally when I am wandering about people tend to pop into view only when I am almost on to of them and they haven't been there until then :D

Glad it's working ok for you Aelia [img]smile.gif[/img]

The screenshot I posted wasn't really an indication of how the game would look for you, more what level of performance you could expect. The person who took that screenshot was complaining because even when he found very sparsley detailed areas of the map (which he has gone out of the way to find for the purposes of that screenshot) where there wern't really any objects being rendered at all, his FPS was still low, whereas other games he plays on that 9600 pro like Far Cry look far more detailed and run far faster for him.

How will a 9600 XT do?

Among the more intersting of conflicting data is that ATI itself named the 9500 Pro card as the minimum suggested GPU, and that is a faster card than any of the 9600's are. Then Bethesda came along and is saying that the 9600's are OK after all! If you want an "Old Card" that will run the game at medium quality settings, and still be inexpensive because it's now on the overstocks and surplus market, get a 9800 Pro or 9800 XT.

Rather than trying to make individual personal comparisons, go to a site such as gpureview and let it make two at a time matchups. Avoid "cross- family" and "cross- origin" pairings, because this site offers bare raw numbers that don't tell the whole story when matched up (based on those numbers, the nVidia FX's look a lot better than the Radeon 9xxx's, which is certainly not true).

Here is the ATI suggested "Bottom of the Pile" vs. your 9600 XT:

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards....d1=27&card2=82

You'll notice in particular the count of pipelines near the bottom. The 9500 Pro has double what the 9600 XT has, which is where the advantage lies.


:D

[ 03-28-2006, 10:56 AM: Message edited by: The Kiwi ]

In short, the 9600 XT will run Oblivion, but at a bare minimum. As I am short on money, I don't know whether or not I will go out to buy a new card.

bump