OB: test your system specs

[Tyrion]

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?

[Aelia Jusa]

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! ). 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?

[Zink Whistlefly]

Originally posted by Aelia Jusa: 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! ). 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

[Aelia Jusa]

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?

[The Kiwi]

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 ]

[vesselle]

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

[Zink Whistlefly]

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.

[The Kiwi]

Originally posted by vesselle: [QB] i have the x700 with 256 mb ram, and it's tested as FAILED on the srs test "recommended" level.

If it's an X700 "Pro", I can imagine that it could do so.

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.

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 ]

[vesselle]

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.

V***V

[Aelia Jusa]

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