I'm sorry but I had to come on here amongst people who know what I'm suffering and have a rant about Oblivion. More specifically about the fact that my BRAND NEW pc won't play it. I have been waiting so long to actually get a decent machine and the anticipation for the game has been unbearable (okay not that unbearable but I'm going for dramatic effect here) - I finally manage to afford my copy and then find out I've only got an ATI Radeon 9200 graphics card when in fact I apparently need a 9500+. 300 measly little, um, whatever they ares between me and blissful gaming. sob.( And yes I could have sworn I checked the system requirements/my pc specs but these things happen to the best of us.) But the makers are so cruel that I only find this out after the game has installed beautifully and shown me lots of mouthwatering screen shots, and played the intro with no problems. Only then does it go to a blank white screen and not work, when I'm all hyped up and ready to go. more sobs. Tea and sympathy please. And pass the chocolate muffins.

Here, have a muffin. And a link to Oldblivion - a mod that may help you. ;) If it don't, ah well.. Stuff it, have a whole bunch o' muffins.

Blithering barnacles! It worked. I am in shock. Thank you Sever, I owe you a whole basket of muffins. I've had to put the brightness up as far as it'll go to see anything, but apart from that, so far so good! Yeay! Thanks again, I had no idea there was such a mod, you are a genius. [img]smile.gif[/img] It just goes to show, there is a point to moaning after all!

Hey! Slow down a bit, woman. I'm not the genius here! But thanks for the muffins. :D

lol sorry got a bit carried away there. Big thanks to whomever wrote the mod anyhow! And I just realised I should have given you pie, not muffins. oops

Just out of curiosity, what kind of hardware are you using and what are your average indoor and outdoor framerates after using Oldblivion?

Oh, and muffins are good. [img]smile.gif[/img]

*Shifty eyes* Uh, I wrote it. *Helps himself to muffins*

Nah seriously, the Old-blivion mod is great. If you know how, post some screens of how it looks for you at the moment. Even though my system can run Oblivion I am a fan of the older shaders...odd I know, but it's true. I tried it once and it looked fine save for the lack of shiny armor looked a bit strange. Not sure what new miracle tweaks the creator has added into this mod recently though.

lol - Well seeing as these are virtual muffins you don't need to make false claims to get your mitts on them, Spirit! Help yourself. Okay, well I have made some screenshots but don't know how to post them on here (copy and paste doesn't work so you will have already gathered I am not great with technology!)If you techo chaps tell me how I will have a go. To be honest I see very little difference from Morrowind except things are perhaps a tad dingier. I am running on a Pentium 4 (3Ghz) CPU, with 512 meg of RAM and 120GB Hard drive. I don't know how to tell you the framerates, Sever, but the movement is fairly fluid, the trees sway in the wind etc, and the only real problem is that things in the far distance are not actually there till you get closer, but hey I don't mind surprises [img]smile.gif[/img]

You'll need a site to host your pics if they are to be viewed on the web. There's oodles out there. I use Boomspeed.com for my relatively infrequent pic needs though i think they no longer provide free hosting. Ask around, or try googling for "free web host" or something. I'm sure fellow IWers also have plenty of free web host details if you're handing muffins around.

With that RAM and that video card it's a wonder you get Oblivion to run at all. A credit to the Oldblivion maker/s.

I forget the console command needed to display frames/sec on screen while playing. I'll post back..

[ 06-26-2006, 12:50 AM: Message edited by: Sever ]

Jelly: You could expand the lifespan of your PC by adding some RAM, 512Mb seems on the low side compared to the rest of your hardware. RAM isnt all that expensive either, but you have to make sure its of a type that your motherboard can handle.

1Gb is pretty much the minimum nowadays, 2 is preferrable.

EDIT: My (new:p) PC has the same CPU as yours but 2Gb RAM, a modern HD and a newer graphics card. Looking at your setup it seems like your processor is a bit ahead of the other components, and your PC is only as good as its weakest link. Normally one shoulnt bother with the very latest CPU when shopping a PC, the latest ones tend to be overpriced (a simple rule of thumb is to look at when there is a huge jump in the $/additional GHz ratio for the optimal CPU to buy). And for normal applications (there are some exceptions) and games it is very rare for the CPU to be the bottleneck. Its better to save some money there and go for a better graphics card plus some extra RAM.

BTW: The rule of thumb for RAM is to go for 4 times as much as Dell have in their simplest models:p

[ 09-14-2006, 05:44 AM: Message edited by: Zaleukos ]

Yeah, buy a one gig stick of RAM if your motherboard can handle it. There is a huge difference between 500 and 1500.

Speed of the RAM is also important for extra performance, but your RAM will only be as fast as your slowest stick of RAM, so for optimal performance you might want to change your old stick too if it's slow. Of course you don't necesarilly need fast RAM. 1500 slow RAM is still way better than 500 RAM.

I still refuse to use more than a gig. No game really utilizes that much. To me it is like having a gig of Vram on your card, what's the point? The difference between 1 and 2 gigs in games is practically unnoticeable and since games are optimized to dump it every so often all you're really doing is delaying that dump for twice as long...why bother?

Apparently the upcoming Vista is even more 'ram-friendly' since it makes other applications 'sleep' when running a frontline app. (i.e. a game). Although I gather the overall running requirement is higher than Win XP.

First of all I'm admittedly a bit biased towards RAM as I use my PC for work as well, and run some extremely memory-hungry applications. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Doesnt the (probably a tad more bloated than the final release) current Vista beta use something like 800MB of RAM?

VRAM is only used by games, RAM on the other hand helps Windows over all and extend the lifespan by a year or two (at least for me it meant that I could save my upgrade until I encountered a graphically demanding game that I really wanted), while not being as hideously expensive as a high-end graphics card. Memory performance isnt increasing nearly as fast as that of some other components (GPU etc) either, making an investment in RAM a bit more future proof.

Your priorities might be a bit different if you buy new graphically demanding games very often, but its still unwise to let RAM lag behind the rest of the system.

The 512MB in Jelly's system is definitely too little today and will force a lot of swapping as Windows will use virtual memory much of the time. Windows XP, a firewall and AV will eat up a few hundred megabytes on their own.