Oblivion has gone Gold

[imported_X]

I've been trying to decide whether to upgrad my pc to play Oblivion, or whether to buy a 360. What are others doing?

I'm worried that the graphics quality will suck on the 360. I played KOTOR on my pc and loved it, but KOTOR II on the Xbox (even with HD output) was crap.

 

[terry107]

Originally posted by: X
I've been trying to decide whether to upgrad my pc to play Oblivion, or whether to buy a 360. What are others doing?

I'm worried that the graphics quality will suck on the 360. I played KOTOR on my pc and loved it, but KOTOR II on the Xbox (even with HD output) was crap.

From what I've read, the graphics will be equal on both the 360 and PC. The only thing the PC offers is mod/construction set support.

 

[Tom]

Why should a game company test Win2000 compatibility ?

It is not an operating system that was ever marketed to consumers, is it ?

 

[FlasHBurN]

Originally posted by: terry107

Originally posted by: X
I've been trying to decide whether to upgrad my pc to play Oblivion, or whether to buy a 360. What are others doing?

I'm worried that the graphics quality will suck on the 360. I played KOTOR on my pc and loved it, but KOTOR II on the Xbox (even with HD output) was crap.

From what I've read, the graphics will be equal on both the 360 and PC. The only thing the PC offers is mod/construction set support.

Graphics might be, but performance is a whole 'nother story. Not to mention the fact that you can increase AA/AF on the computer, and run at higher than HD resolutions.

I'll be running on an Opteron 165 (~2.4ghz hopefully), 2GB Ram, and an X1900XTX. Should get decent enough frames at the highest settings.

 

[DeathReborn]

Originally posted by: tuteja1986

Originally posted by: DeathReborn

Originally posted by: StrangerGuy
I have a 3GHz P4 and 9800 Pro, and yet the frame rate averages only around 30 and sometimes even dip below 20 in exterior areas when I play Morrowind. Thus, I predict Oblivion will run slow and choppy even with top-end hardware.

You'd notice big improvements if you got a better video card. I predict it'll be smooth as silk on my SLI 7800GT, 2.7GHz A64 & 2GB RAM. May not be high end, it's fairly middle of the road as far as rigs go but it's good enough to satisfy me.

you be surprised :! they downgraded the graphic alot since even the 7800GTX SLI had trouble play the game ;( They took out individual shadows for non-movable objects. they tonned down the lighting effect that looked like dreamy and took out other few things. The game was ready for decemberish launch but the game was too graphically advance so they delayed it to fix it and even amped up the fighting system and tone down graphic a bit to make sure it runs on decent machine

Yea, I was going to upgrade to CF X1900XTX or SLI 7900GTX 512 until they removed the HQ Textures, Lighting & a lot of the shadows. Now i'm just gonna wait for UT2007 and AM2 to upgrade.

For the record, I played Morrowind on a Athlon XP-M 2500+, 1GB RAM & a Sapphire 9600 (non pro) 256MB @ 1024x768 without much trouble.

 

[Powermoloch]

I hope my rig can run it well on 12x10...... AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

 

[Artician]

I have a 3GHz P4 and 9800 Pro, and yet the frame rate averages only around 30 and sometimes even dip below 20 in exterior areas when I play Morrowind. Thus, I predict Oblivion will run slow and choppy even with top-end hardware.

Actually that is the wierdest characteristic of any game I've ever seen - your card is "too powerful" or somesuch nonesense. There is something with either the engine, or a certain level of cards and the way the hardware doesnt get along with the engine, that causes the game to have extremely low framerates on cards between the 9X00-X800 ATI cards, and 6X00-whatever level of nvidia cards. I have no idea what it is, but there was a large amount of this on the Morrowind boards in the last two years.

My own personal experiences with this were when I upgraded myself. I had a Geforce3 Ti500, which would run Morrowind silky smooth. I upgraded first to an ATI X800, and later to a 6800 Ultra when the first card wouldn't push some apps correctly, and both of those cards during that time made Morrowind nigh-unplayable. I've never seen anything like it, I rarely heard of anyone with similar level hardware not having the issue, and Bethesda's response to it was that it was just that it was just a way the engine dealt with the card or vice-versa. (That engine really is terrible). By that time Morrowind was probably not supported with anyone at the studio, so no patches were issued or any other resolutions.

On the brighter side, I recently upgraded to the 7800GTX and of course popped in Morrowind just to see how it ran with that. I was expecting a circus of chaos and bad framerates, but it seems back to normal. For some reason it was just that family of cards, and now I'm running it again at 1600x1200 at framerates that are too high to bother measuring. Go figure.

 

[wanderer27]

I first ran Morrowind on an XP2000 with 512MB RAM and a Ti4400. Ran really well for me.

I later upgraded to 1GB RAM, and definitely noticed an increase in smoothness/speed.

My current System of course really runs it well. Even the Loading spots load a heck of a lot faster

Another thing to remember is the *.ini file for Morrowind. You can adjust some things in it to take advantage of your components.
I'm sure Oblivion will have a similar option.

 

[Phantronius]

Originally posted by: wanderer27
I first ran Morrowind on an XP2000 with 512MB RAM and a Ti4400. Ran really well for me.

I later upgraded to 1GB RAM, and definitely noticed an increase in smoothness/speed.

My current System of course really runs it well. Even the Loading spots load a heck of a lot faster

Another thing to remember is the *.ini file for Morrowind. You can adjust some things in it to take advantage of your components.
I'm sure Oblivion will have a similar option.

I dunno about that.

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: Tom
Why should a game company test Win2000 compatibility ?

It is not an operating system that was ever marketed to consumers, is it ?

Consumers bought it. If you bought ME or somesuch in those days, were you smarter?

Are you going to make the same remark for various flavors of Vista?

Of course, there's no reason why anyone should do anything per se. But if a game company wants more dollars for probably minimal effort, because XP and W2K are very similar underneath, then they shouldn't cut W2K out. And if consumers are really smart, and want flexibility in OS's, they should encourage that attitude instead of an buy-the-OS-flavor of the month one.

 

[Wag]

Be nice if this game actually offered 64bit support, it certainly could use it.

 

[wanderer27]

People on the Official Forums seem to believe W2K will work, but I can't get a definitive answer on this yet.

XP-64bit is also thought to work since it's supposed to be backwards compatible with 32bit apps. I don't know enough about XP-64bit to say one way or another. My thinking is that if you have all the 64bit drivers needed to run what you have, you should be fine - dunno.

Since the Xbox is multi-core, it's been said that the PC version also has some multi-core support. How much and what, I don't know. I just remember seeing one of the Devs saying this some months back. Things could have changed, but I don't know why they'd remove this.

 

[Tom]

Originally posted by: Madwand1

Originally posted by: Tom
Why should a game company test Win2000 compatibility ?

It is not an operating system that was ever marketed to consumers, is it ?

Consumers bought it. If you bought ME or somesuch in those days, were you smarter?

Are you going to make the same remark for various flavors of Vista?

Of course, there's no reason why anyone should do anything per se. But if a game company wants more dollars for probably minimal effort, because XP and W2K are very similar underneath, then they shouldn't cut W2K out. And if consumers are really smart, and want flexibility in OS's, they should encourage that attitude instead of an buy-the-OS-flavor of the month one.

Nothing personal, I just don't understand why a game company is expected to test game compatibility for an operating system that is 7 or 8 years old and was never intended as a consumer operating system.

Without knowing how many game consumers are running Win2k, I can't comment on the economic wisdom of spending money on testing games for it. You seem to think they will make more money than the testing will cost, how do you come to that conclusion ?

 

[TheRyuu]

Morrowind seems to just be badly programed right? On my SLI rig, I can turn on AA and AF and it will dip into the 30's and 40's in fps.

 

[kmmatney]

Originally posted by: wanderer27
Yeah, I'm running through Morrowind for about the fourth/fifth time with the Better Bodies, Better Heads, and a Graphics enhancement Mod - things look a whole lot nicer with today's horsepower and updated graphics.

I know wat you mean. I'm running it again with my new hardware and it looks great. It's nice being able to set the viewing distance to the highest setting, and still get nice framerates at 1280 x 1024. The bloodmoon expansion added some better graphics and better game play features as well.

 

[kmmatney]

Originally posted by: darXoul
Morrowind was OK in terms of graphics, atmosphere, etc. but:

- it bored the crap out of me with countless pretty weak quests, not even connected with the main storyline and hopelessly overshadowing it;
- it bored the crap out of me with endless running around the huge world (mount, please!);
- it annoyed me with "sterile" and boring dialog options;
- it had sucky monsters, weak and... well... boring;
- I HATE CLIFF RACERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Good they are not a part of Oblivion

- I agree there was a ridiculous amount of quests
- There were lots of ways to get around quickly - Enchanting an item with a high amount of levitate will get you around quickly, or enchanting an item to increase you speed helps. I was able to get around as fast as my computer would let me, it had to keep loading up new areas every 2 seconds I was moving so fast.
- The monsters get weak pretty fast, I start with a difficulty of 40, and increase as I go.
- Use arrows to get rid of Cliff racers from a long way away. Also, do not "clear" their corpses and they won't keep coming back.

 

[lavaheadache]

this game looks freaking awesome

 

[darXoul]

Originally posted by: kmmatney
- There were lots of ways to get around quickly - Enchanting an item with a high amount of levitate will get you around quickly, or enchanting an item to increase you speed helps. I was able to get around as fast as my computer would let me, it had to keep loading up new areas every 2 seconds I was moving so fast.
- The monsters get weak pretty fast, I start with a difficulty of 40, and increase as I go.
- Use arrows to get rid of Cliff racers from a long way away. Also, do not "clear" their corpses and they won't keep coming back.

- Yes, I used levitate a lot. Still, IMO the characters simply moved too slow, even with high Athetlics
- I was also increasing difficulty. There was a simple lvl-dependent "formula" I used;
- I realize that leaving their corpses on the ground stopped the respawning process but this way, I couldn't gather the super valuable racer plumes

 

[psihog]

I'm still on 5th trial in Morrowind. was hoping to get to red mountain by the time Oblivion comes out. Two areas I hope Oblivion improves on are traveling and NPC. That'll make side quests more interesting.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Originally posted by: Extelleron

Originally posted by: wanderer27

Originally posted by: RobertR1
Would be nice if they were to release a performance benchmark ahead of time for people looking to upgrade. A built in benchmark within the demo would be nice to have.

You were asking about a Demo and I just ran across this Oblivion evaluator on the NVidia Site:


http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_oblivion_home.html

All that tests is whether you can RUN it or not. I think with an FX-53 and an OC'd X1800XT he knows he can run it, the question for him is whether or not its better to get it for PC or 360. I'll let you guess which version I'm getting. *Points to specs in sig*

The PC is where The Elder Scrolls games are. It is all about the mods baby!

 

[wanderer27]

Originally posted by: darXoul

- I realize that leaving their corpses on the ground stopped the respawning process but this way, I couldn't gather the super valuable racer plumes

Sure you can, just use the "Take All" button instead of the "Dispose of Corpse" button

 

[samduhman]

Why is this is in the video forums?

 

[wanderer27]

Originally posted by: samduhman

Why is this is in the video forums?

Because this is supposed to be a Graphically impressive game. One of the reasons we browse here is to investigate tweaking and improving Graphic capabilities and technology.

For some of us, this is a good way to test out and demonstrate the capabilities of the Systems we have put together. I mean without Photoshop/Imagining software or games, what's the point of all this graphical horsepower ?

You know, the same reason we had BF2, COD, Fear, and etc. threads on here

 

[techwanabe]

Hmmm...

where are the hot chicks! Sorry I couldn't resist!

I played NWN but never Morrowind - many of the characters were butt ugly but it isn't reason I didn't play.

 

[DeathReborn]

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh

Originally posted by: Extelleron

Originally posted by: wanderer27

Originally posted by: RobertR1
Would be nice if they were to release a performance benchmark ahead of time for people looking to upgrade. A built in benchmark within the demo would be nice to have.

You were asking about a Demo and I just ran across this Oblivion evaluator on the NVidia Site:


http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_oblivion_home.html

All that tests is whether you can RUN it or not. I think with an FX-53 and an OC'd X1800XT he knows he can run it, the question for him is whether or not its better to get it for PC or 360. I'll let you guess which version I'm getting. *Points to specs in sig*

The PC is where The Elder Scrolls games are. It is all about the mods baby!

QFT

The Mods made Morrowing even more of a cult classic and the 360 is going to sorely lack it .