Tempest! Or Other Nerds Who Can Help!

DarkNoise

DarkNoise

Grotesque Butchery Rabbit
Jun 20, 2002
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Outskirts of the City of Subdued Excitement
www.geocities.com
so I went out and got Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion!

But it won't run above 10FPS on my computer, anyone got hints?

Windows XP Home fully updated
Intel P4 3.02Ghz
1GB Corsair DDR RAM
128MB GeForce FX
200GB Western Digital SATA hard drive

Only processes I have running are the bare essentials for Windows and the game to run.. IE no Messengers, firewalls, or even internet connection.

I also can't crank up the settings on other games like I should be able to. I know people with weaker systems than mine who can damn near crank up Doom3, but I'm stuck on the low-mid end at around 800x600 resolution.

C'mon, use those twinkie-fed mt. dew-garbled brains and help me out!

Could it be my motherboards chipset which I have forgotten what I have?
 
It's your video card. I had a geforce 6600 256RAM PCI Express, 3.0GHZ P4, 1 GIG DDR2 Ram, and a Intel 945 motherboard, it still dragged when I was in the forest. I upgraded to 2 GIGs of ram, and a geforce 7300 512 RAM.................the game still suffers slightly in the heavy forest areas, but runs great everywhere else. I bought the 7300 for $129. Worth every penny!
 
that's also what I think, you'll have to upgrade your video card :( They are usually expensive... good luck finding a cheap one. Also, buying 512 more rams wouldn't hurt, and it'S pretty cheap nowadays.
 
I'm still wondering though, my brother has a computer similar to yours and he doesn't have any problems running the game. Did you set all the graphics to maximum? Perhaps you need to update the version of your graphic card? Did you think of updating your sound card? I discovered that a lot of times, fps drops not because of graphics, but because of sounds.

When I say update, I mean downloading new drivers on the net, btw. Just to be sure we're talking about the same thing.
 
I'm really no expert, but if everything is updated, then it's probably the graphic card. Games are rarely demanding enough in the sound department to require a sound card change.
 
The GeForce FX series cards specifically have problems with Oblivion due to their very poor implementation of Shader Model 2 support. That entire line should have been an abortion. Assuming you are limited to AGP card choices, the highest end card you can support is the 7800GS at ~ $300. Alternately, you can pick up an older 6800 or X800 series card for 150-175.
 
You werent very specific with your graphics card, but I believe shaders aren't the problem. If your graphics card was even older as to not support pixel shaders 2.0, then www.oldblivion.com would have been where you go.

I have a 3700+ (2,4ghz) 1024 RAM, and a geforce 6800, and it's pretty smooth on high in 800x600. I can play on 1024, but it might slow down every once in a while.

A general tip while playing is to do a 360 when you first enter a new area, so it initially loads most textures, to prevent future slowdowns.

hang on, I had a tweaking link for Oblivion.

Here we go:

http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_1.html

I wouldn't recommend tweaking the main settings that would be otherwise changed ingame, but there are some advanced tweaks such as memory allocation and a few things that really should be changed, and mostly result in a better experience.
 
I have basically all the same specs as you DarkNoize, except for a GeForce 6800, and it runs pretty smoothly (when I shut down all nonessential processes). I used that tweak guide that karmic linked to, and it helped a little, I was able to up the graphics a bit more than I could before. I can only run the game at 800x600, but with the HDR, large textures, it looks better than any settings I could get out of it running at 1024x768.
 
Not the video card, I'm running:
P4 2.8ghz
768 megs of RAM(DDR 2700)
Radeon 9550

I get around 25 FPS on average on minimum settings.
 
Sorry, just trolling boards now. Heres what I think:

Which FX card do you have? Not that it really matters too much, but if you have a 5200 then its more than likely the video card, but if your rocking a 5600 or better then you should be running like Sanctums at 25 FPS or better. What everyone else is saying about the shader engine is correct also, you need a 6 series card, you can get a GeForce 6600 AGP card for about 100 bucks now. It has the same exact processing power as the FX series cards, but the 6 series cards have the new shader engines and high dynamic range lighting support.

But you said you have a shitty sound card too, is it on board or is it an actual card? I had a problem with Battlefield 1942 with my old computer, I had an Athlon 1700+ a gig of ram and a GeForce FX 5600 256MB and it ran shittier than people who had systems half as good as mine... Turns out I had the audio settings set a little too high and didn't realize it. What was happening was the audio processing was being handled by CPU and it was slowing up the entire game.

So I would recomend looking into a GeForce 6 card, possibly a new sound card. Hope this helps.

PS: this is why I bought a 360, fuck PC troubleshooting for games.
 
I'm thinking it's worth buying a 360 JUST for oblivion, cause hell if anyone's gonna get it running that good on a PC for the same price.
 
Chromatose said:
I'm thinking it's worth buying a 360 JUST for oblivion, cause hell if anyone's gonna get it running that good on a PC for the same price.
Click to expand...

I think it may be worth buying a 360 for Oblivion, future Halo games, Doom3: ROE, Fuzion Frenzy, and a huge amount of other games I love.

I agree with the whole fuck PC troubleshooting, but I don't have the funding right now to get any new systems.

As far as my sound card goes, I have a SoundBlaster Live! 5.1. I haven't had issues with any other games with it, but the newest game I have next to Oblivion is Call of Duty 2 and Doom3, which aren't quite as bad as far as hogging resources.

For the record: Sid Meier's Pirates is teh fvking pwn!
 
SoundBlaster is good, always, since you have a card it has an audio processor, so your CPU isn't getting hit with sound processing. Im guessing the video card is what you should replace, also, when upgrading a video card, i like to format just to clean up all the drivers and shit, especially if you go from ATI to Nvidia or Nvidia to ATI. You want to look for:

Nvidia GeForce 6600 or better, this includes GT, GS, and all those other extentions. or you want an ATI Radeon X series, x700 or better. Either of these support all the new lighting and shadow rendering capabilities. Battlefield 2, Half-Life 2, Oblivian, Call of Duty 2, all these and many more use HDR, so the new video card will definately make them play smoother (and look better)
 
Also, about Oblivion, my friend has an Athlon 64 3200+ and DUAL GeForce 6800 Ultras running SLI, and 2 GB of RAM and he said Oblion ran kinda slow at parts on full graphics. He ordered a GeForce 7800 GTX and said it's running better now.
 
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