Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion ?Chuck? Patch

[Madellga]

Originally posted by: Ackmed
Pretty playale at 1920x1200, HDR+ 4xAA, 16xHQ AF. Foliage drops the frames pretty far, all other areas are pretty smooth. I suspect 2xAA in Foliage would be smooth enough, at 4x, its not enough for me. Ive also got all the image quality enhancements increased thru the game's .ini. So that puts a pretty large hit on frames too.

Opty@2.6, 2x1900XT's Crossfire, A8R32-MVP.

Ackmed, do you think you need Xfire for your 2405? I tried a SLI GTX 4 weeks ago and my feeling was that the gain was not worth it. A single GTX was fine in most cases.

I didn't try Oblivion though....

PS: I solved the noise problem on the DFI chipset cooler by feeding it 7V. It is not audible anymore. Now I have a super silent system. System iddle @ 33C... gaming @ 40C
Not sure what a X1900 with aftermarket cooler would do to it.....

 

[Gstanfor]

The way things are shaping up lately ATi may as well use the TWIMTBP program too - in their case it's "The Way It's Meant To Be Patched"...

 

[Ackmed]

Yes I feel like I do. Ive had this 2405 since the first week they came out, about a year ago. At the time, I had a X850XT/PE, and it was ok for 1920x1200. Then BF2 came out, and it killed my frames.. Luckily the 7800GTX came out, so I got it. Onec again I was fine at 1920x1200 in every game. Until CoD2 and F.E.A.R. came out, the 7800GTX just choked at 1920x1200 in those games.. so I got another GTX. In those two games, SLI was worth it to me. I still could play 1920x1200 in F.E.A.R., but I could do 1680x1050. CoD2 ran very well at 1920x1200, both games gained about 90$ of frames from SLI.

In Oblivion, the second X1900 is easily worth it to me. FS's numbers show a vast improvement, its sad they do not test above 1600x1200 though. This 2405 has *forced* me to upgrade more often than I really wanted. But I love the 1920x1200 res, and newer games just push older hardware too far sometimes.

 

[RobertR1]

Originally posted by: Gstanfor
The way things are shaping up lately ATi may as well use the TWIMTBP program too - in their case it's "The Way It's Meant To Be Patched"...

Like the way nvidia release beta drivers left and right? oh wait, wasn't their an nvidia driver released just for oblivion? Wanna tell me the last time ati released a beta driver? I think it was back in the Cat4.11 days. Idiot.

 

[Madellga]

Ackmed, I was in a similar situation. I had a X850 when I bought my 2405 and it was not enough. I went to a 7800GTX, later to a 7800GT SLI, a X1900XT and last a 7900GTX.
The last 2 moves was done due to the 512MB.

I didn't keep the X1900XT due to the fan noise during gameplay. It was really annoying for me.

In my last post, when I mentioned I tried a GTX SLI, it was with the 7900, not 7800.

I am not playing Oblivion yet. I have a couple of "older" games bought but not played. I decided to play them before buying a new one. I felt that on these games a single 7900 GTX is enough.

I just finished Quake4, now playing KOTOR for the first time, have still Riddick, Ages of Mythology, X2 and BFME2. WoW took too much of my time, never again!

I am patient and normally wait for the games to drop at least 50% on the price before buying. Exception for BFME1/2, I liked BFME too much to wait.

With FRAPS on, those games were very playable at 1920x1200 4AA 8AF TSAA.

I agree with you that the 2405 coupled with newer games drives the need for a more frequent video card upgrade.

One thing I noticed when selling cards over ebay: Nvidia cards sold better (% of original price) than ATI. What's your experience?

 

[Ackmed]

I sold my BFG 7800GTX's for $355, and $360 each I think on ebay. I posted them a few days after the reviews came out for tge 7900's. I was afraid I wouldnt get enough cash for them, as the 7900GT was faster, and at the time, cheaper. But a guy from Hawaii and then another from Canada won the auctions. Their prices are a lot higher than ours, so I guess that was a good deal for them. I havent sold a high end ATi card in about a year, and that was my X850XT/PE.

Interview with "Chuck" http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=5282

Chuck @ ATI On Friday, I spent a few hours studying the game's rendering path. Over the weekend I thought about how I could design an HDR+AA path for Oblivion without breaking other programs. On Monday, I wrote all the code and started testing it. I'd say about 12 hours total for designing and coding

Kinda makes Bethesda look bad, when first they said it couldnt be done, then later said it would take too long. Chuck did it in 12 hours?

 

[jrphoenix]

Originally posted by: 5150Joker
New video I made with my X1900XTX using HDR+2xAA/2x Temporal AA + 8xHQ AF. Warning it has major spoilers so don't watch it if you don't want to know what happens at the end of the Oblivion Gates quest: X1900 XTX HDR 2xAA/2xTAA + 8xHQ AF


I'm averaging 30-35 fps using HDR+AA at 1680x1050 with all settings maxed except grass shadows and self shadows. Indoors my fps never drops below 50+ fps.

I was looking forward to it..... bandwith limit exceeded

 

[nitromullet]

Well. I'm glad to see that this thread didn't become a gazillion pages while I was away. As I've been playing Oblivion in most of my spare time, I haven't really had time to check back in with you guys. Here is what I think:

1) Nice job Chuck :beer:

2) For some reason when I first installed my X1900XTX, I could not get the WDM driver to install. Tried Driver Cleaner and anything else I knew about. Since, I had just re-built the OS not too long ago, I just decided to do that again. It probably actually took me less time to do that than to try to tech the issue (so don't bother giving me recommendations on what I need to do). It installed like a charm on the clean build. I'm really not sure where the fault lies with this issue, but having to nuke and pave my PC just to install a new video card is a first for me.

3) IMO, Oblivion is barely playable at 1680x1050 with 4xAA+HDR/16xAF on an X1900XTX. It can be done, but really only because (so far) most of the combat has been indoors where the FPS stays nice and high. I have had a few skirmishes outdoors, and they are quite difficult because of the low FPS. This is especially true when battling a caster that is lobbing some sort of fireball at you. Honestly, I wish this game wasn't so damn addictive because I bet an R600 or G80 card is what this game really needs, but I'm not going to wait because I'm having too much fun.

One thing I noticed when selling cards over ebay: Nvidia cards sold better (% of original price) than ATI. What's your experience?

...definitely my experience as well. My X1800XT sold for less than 50% of what I paid for it, both my 7800GTX'es for about 75%, and my 7900GTX'es for about 95%. I knew the 7900GTX would sell well though - I did a Buy it Now on one of them for $499, and it sold in about 6 hours. I know I could have sold the 7900GTX for more, but I knew that I was buying a cheaper X1900XTX, and I did better than break even.

Kinda makes Bethesda look bad, when first they said it couldnt be done, then later said it would take too long. Chuck did it in 12 hours?

Agreed. The thing is though, I don't think that Oblivion is a TWIMTBP title. There isn's a NVIDIA logo anywhere on the box, a NVIDIA splash screen at the beginning of the game, or any mention of NVIDIA on the website.

 

[jim1976]

Chuck's interview @ Hexus.. The guy has sense of humor..

 

[Yreka]

I still dont have it working correctly. I may have screwed up uninstalling everything, then applying the "patch" that looks like a driver
I re-installed CCC, and have the icon and right-click funcitonality on the taskbar, but cannot open the CCC app to set my overclock. I think this may be why I am not getting AA even though it is forced in the driver. I will mess with it abit more tonight.

Sure looks pretty good w/o it though. And damn, it gives the card a workout. I hit 38c for the first time last night at stock clocks, it usually hovers around 34c under load w/ CCC's overdrive settings maxed.

 

[giantpinkbunnyhead]

Originally posted by: Yreka
I still dont have it working correctly. I may have screwed up uninstalling everything, then applying the "patch" that looks like a driver
I re-installed CCC, and have the icon and right-click funcitonality on the taskbar, but cannot open the CCC app to set my overclock. I think this may be why I am not getting AA even though it is forced in the driver. I will mess with it abit more tonight.

Sure looks pretty good w/o it though. And damn, it gives the card a workout. I hit 38c for the first time last night at stock clocks, it usually hovers around 34c under load w/ CCC's overdrive settings maxed.

Mine initially didn't work the first time either. I ended up installing the Catalyst drivers from the disk that came with my card; then I installed the Chuck patch over that. Another catch-up that gets people seems to be the Catalyst A.I. Setting. When I checked, mine was disabled. I enabled it and that did the trick.

 

[nitromullet]

Originally posted by: jim1976
Chuck's interview @ Hexus.. The guy has sense of humor..

Currently, this path is only enabled for Oblivion under Catalyst AI app detection. The exciting thing is that this ForceAA path could be enabled for other games in the future, like FarCry and Splinter Cell, so these games could get HDR+AA also!

That would be very cool and would be what ATI needs. If at all possible, they need to take this out of the developers' hands and allow end users to force AA in apps that don't support it for whatever reason. Crytek is obviously taking its own sweet time on getting their patch out for HDR+AA. Although, for some reason, I think it would be going a bit faster if it was NVIDIA that had the only card on the market that could do HDR+AA.

 

[MrCoyote]

This sounds great, since I was planning on getting a 1800XT soon. I still think that Bethesda was too clumsy in making this game. It uses the Gamebyro engine, which is just an updated one that Morrowind used. This engine seems very unoptimized compared to other 3D engines. There is no reason that framerate should be dipping lower than 30FPS outdoors, even at 800x600.

I think us PC gamers got the short end of the stick. The game is basically a console port. The UI is very lacking. You can only see a few inventory items at a time. There was many things taken out of the game. Morrowind had a much better inventory system. Basically this game was made general and marketed toward more people. Many things have been consolidated. You can't wear robes over armor, etc...

 

[RobertR1]

Originally posted by: MrCoyote
This sounds great, since I was planning on getting a 1800XT soon. I still think that Bethesda was too clumsy in making this game. It uses the Gamebyro engine, which is just an updated one that Morrowind used. This engine seems very unoptimized compared to other 3D engines. There is no reason that framerate should be dipping lower than 30FPS outdoors, even at 800x600.

I think us PC gamers got the short end of the stick. The game is basically a console port. The UI is very lacking. You can only see a few inventory items at a time. There was many things taken out of the game. Morrowind had a much better inventory system. Basically this game was made general and marketed toward more people. Many things have been consolidated. You can't wear robes over armor, etc...

Get the BT mod to change your inventory screen so it doesn't fill up with only 4 items showing. While the game, out of the box, leaves a few things to be desired, most of them are compensated by 3rd party mods. I'm not saying this is right but it's better than nothing.

 

[PingSpike]

It almost sounds like the real reason it wasn't supported to begin with is some sort of politics going on behind the scenes...whether it be microsoft wanting it to be xbox360 only so they could try to sell it as better, or nvidia involved some how. The only other explaination is bethseda's developers are incompetent.

 

[dalearyous]

Originally posted by: Extelleron
I'm wishing more and more I'd got Oblivion for the PC rather than 360. HDR+AA is one of the things that made me get the 360 version........ now PC has the advantage again.

pc will always have the advantage...if you have the machine to do it

 

[TanisHalfElven]

even without the machine (x1900xt) oblvion for pc is better. cuz of mods.

 

[BFG10K]

i dunno.. it's weird. enabling 4xAAA certainly affects framerate - drops it about 8fps with AAA engabled as you can see in the screenshots, however visually it doesn't have an impact. possible AA is only applied to certain things (tho that wouldn't make sense to me).

Why wouldn't it make sense? That's exactly what adaptive/transparency AA does - it applies SSAA but only on alpha textures. You should be checking the vegetation like trees and grass for IQ gains.

 

[Ackmed]

Originally posted by: nitromullet

Agreed. The thing is though, I don't think that Oblivion is a TWIMTBP title. There isn's a NVIDIA logo anywhere on the box, a NVIDIA splash screen at the beginning of the game, or any mention of NVIDIA on the website.

It is, just like Tomb Raider: Legend. And they both play better on ATi hardware, despite both devs telling you otherwise.

 

[Barkotron]

Originally posted by: CaiNaM

Originally posted by: jim1976

installed the hotpatch, rebooted. forcing 4xaa from ccc, set hdr enabled in game. i can't get it to work either (hdr only in game).

any suggestions?

Really weird.. Installed the patch forced 4xAA in CCC and voila..
Dunno are you sure you're doing everything right?

OMG Oblivion with HDR+AA :shocked:

i dunno.. it's weird. enabling 4xAAA certainly affects framerate - drops it about 8fps with AAA engabled as you can see in the screenshots, however visually it doesn't have an impact. possible AA is only applied to certain things (tho that wouldn't make sense to me).

HDR, No AA, 16xHQAF

HDR, 4xAAA, 16xHQAF

CCC Settngs

Catalyst Version

not sure what else i can try.. reinstall the patch and reboot perhaps?

Sorry, but did you change the screenshots those links point at? They're clearly different now...

Liking it muchly

 

[Vesper8]

so does this patch work on catalyst 6.4 ?

 

[TheRyuu]

ATI and their "HDR" and "AA".

"Bloom" is the way to go

*sobs in corner*

 

[mooncancook]

Nice!
I was in Skingrad. After I applied the hotfix and loaded the game, wow, I immediately noticed the difference inside the town. The ground and buildings look way better. The outdoor is gorgeous. Now I see what HDR+AA is all about, well except FPS suffers a little bit.

 

[imported_Crusader]

Originally posted by: RobertR1

Originally posted by: Gstanfor
The way things are shaping up lately ATi may as well use the TWIMTBP program too - in their case it's "The Way It's Meant To Be Patched"...

Like the way nvidia release beta drivers left and right? oh wait, wasn't their an nvidia driver released just for oblivion? Wanna tell me the last time ati released a beta driver? I think it was back in the Cat4.11 days. Idiot.

Whoa.. chillout toolbox.


Anyway, this is a nice makeshift hack. But I'd be willing to guess that if you want to get future patches for the game and fix its overall bugginess.. you are going to lose your HDR+AA


You need AA+HDR on ATI because you cant hear over those loud fans, gotta make it up to you diehard ATI guys who are buying into the #2 GPU designer in the world somehow.

I never did like AA/AF and prefer to jack up the res personally. My card, or its ATI equivalent couldnt push 1680x1050 with 4x/8x +HDR.

Thats the cold hard fact of the matter without going with a $500 card (and even then?) or Xfire.
And most people are buying the $300 cards.

Sorry.

 

[Praxis1452]

Originally posted by: Crusader

Originally posted by: RobertR1

Originally posted by: Gstanfor
The way things are shaping up lately ATi may as well use the TWIMTBP program too - in their case it's "The Way It's Meant To Be Patched"...

Like the way nvidia release beta drivers left and right? oh wait, wasn't their an nvidia driver released just for oblivion? Wanna tell me the last time ati released a beta driver? I think it was back in the Cat4.11 days. Idiot.

Whoa.. chillout toolbox.


Anyway, this is a nice makeshift hack. But I'd be willing to guess that if you want to get future patches for the game and fix its overall bugginess.. you are going to lose your HDR+AA


You need AA+HDR on ATI because you cant hear over those loud fans, gotta make it up to you diehard ATI guys who are buying into the #2 GPU designer in the world somehow.

I never did like AA/AF and prefer to jack up the res personally. My card, or its ATI equivalent couldnt push 1680x1050 with 4x/8x +HDR.

Thats the cold hard fact of the matter without going with a $500 card (and even then?) or Xfire.
And most people are buying the $300 cards.

Sorry.

troll more? what I thought