oblivion reccomended amd processor
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The game does support dual-core and hyperthreading CPU's fully, but it's such a graphical beast that you'll be hard pressed to find enough video horsepower to keep both cores happy all the time (i.e. graphics bottleneck).
Even on 7800GTX SLI or X1900XT/Crossfire systems, there are a number of graphical bottlenecks. It's also very heavy on the CPU so you really need a bunch of both (video and cpu/memory horsepower) to play this game to it's fullest... and STILL suffer from quite a few slowdowns.
Im sure patches in Oblivion may help this a bit down the road. Morrowind wasnt much different when it first came out, and now modern cards eat it for breakfast. Oblivion's 3d engine really cannot be played "maxed out" with the various INI tweaks, HDR, AA and high resolution even on the most powerful, $5000 systems (yet..). So, it's a case of tuning the game to perform best mixing performance for eye candy to match your hardware.. and the more hardware, the more eye candy you can lop on!
Speaking of mixing, we've even got the game running well on an XP 2500+, 1 gig, 9600 XT system. You can run it even on very low-end systems, you just have to crank settings down. It's a whole different game on our higher end systems though.. HDR + AA plus 1600x1200 and most settings cranked- it looks amazing.
Even on 7800GTX SLI or X1900XT/Crossfire systems, there are a number of graphical bottlenecks. It's also very heavy on the CPU so you really need a bunch of both (video and cpu/memory horsepower) to play this game to it's fullest... and STILL suffer from quite a few slowdowns.
Im sure patches in Oblivion may help this a bit down the road. Morrowind wasnt much different when it first came out, and now modern cards eat it for breakfast. Oblivion's 3d engine really cannot be played "maxed out" with the various INI tweaks, HDR, AA and high resolution even on the most powerful, $5000 systems (yet..). So, it's a case of tuning the game to perform best mixing performance for eye candy to match your hardware.. and the more hardware, the more eye candy you can lop on!
Speaking of mixing, we've even got the game running well on an XP 2500+, 1 gig, 9600 XT system. You can run it even on very low-end systems, you just have to crank settings down. It's a whole different game on our higher end systems though.. HDR + AA plus 1600x1200 and most settings cranked- it looks amazing.
Hi, i'm new to the Forums. Nice ta meet y'all!
Sharkfood: You mentioned that you had got Oblivion running well on an XP 2500+, 1 gig, 9600 XT system. That is basically the system i have. I was wondering what exact settings did you use to get it to run because i am having a few problems.
It becomes extremely jumpy during fight scenes (e.g. when mythic dawn cultists are attacking the emperor in the first level), i can't enable 'bloom' without it screwing up and can't get more than 20 fps. Also, the characters arms and equipped weaponry flicker or simply disappear when the character is outdoors. This doesn't happen when the character is indoors.
Any help would be much appreciated!
Sharkfood: You mentioned that you had got Oblivion running well on an XP 2500+, 1 gig, 9600 XT system. That is basically the system i have. I was wondering what exact settings did you use to get it to run because i am having a few problems.
It becomes extremely jumpy during fight scenes (e.g. when mythic dawn cultists are attacking the emperor in the first level), i can't enable 'bloom' without it screwing up and can't get more than 20 fps. Also, the characters arms and equipped weaponry flicker or simply disappear when the character is outdoors. This doesn't happen when the character is indoors.
Any help would be much appreciated!
Hi Rich,
The biggest issue when playing on a 9600XT surrounds shadows. The more you disable, the better the performance. The 9600XT has decent shader and texture horsepower, but lacks in memory bandwidth... from which shadows consume the most memory bandwidth.
Given that, we're running it here at 800x600, Catalyst 6.2 drivers (official ATI with CCC- no CP, Omega or any of that junk) all shadows disabled (self, tree canopy, world, etc.etc.). We have the grass size tweak set higher and distance sliders a little less than half. Bloom works fine here so if it's causing issues for you, likely you have a particular system or configuration/driver issue.
Lastly, if you have a 128mb model.. you'll need to run textures at Low. 256mb model- you can run low (for more performance) or Medium for better textures but a tad slower performance. High setting is just a bit too much for the 9600XT. You can compensate for lower-texture settings by enabling 2x or 4x anisotropic filtering in the CCC. This can help sharpen up the lower detail textures.
Hope this helps!
The biggest issue when playing on a 9600XT surrounds shadows. The more you disable, the better the performance. The 9600XT has decent shader and texture horsepower, but lacks in memory bandwidth... from which shadows consume the most memory bandwidth.
Given that, we're running it here at 800x600, Catalyst 6.2 drivers (official ATI with CCC- no CP, Omega or any of that junk) all shadows disabled (self, tree canopy, world, etc.etc.). We have the grass size tweak set higher and distance sliders a little less than half. Bloom works fine here so if it's causing issues for you, likely you have a particular system or configuration/driver issue.
Lastly, if you have a 128mb model.. you'll need to run textures at Low. 256mb model- you can run low (for more performance) or Medium for better textures but a tad slower performance. High setting is just a bit too much for the 9600XT. You can compensate for lower-texture settings by enabling 2x or 4x anisotropic filtering in the CCC. This can help sharpen up the lower detail textures.
Hope this helps!
Mictlantecuhtli
Posts: 4,049 +13
CPU speed and the number of cores doesn't make much difference: Oblivion Athlon 64 CPU Performance
Sharkfood: Thanks, i'll try these suggestions. I had just allowed the game to detect the card and leave the options at default, except for upping the resolution from 640x480 to 800x600.
The card is the 256mb version, although i don't really see what extra value that would give since I'd heard that these cards are limited by the memory speed rather than the memory size. I guess that any overclocking that i can manage for the memory will help a lot on that score. I just tried using ATI tools last night to find the maximum achievable GPU and memory clock speeds but the card suffers from catastrophic failure when i run it for any length of time near these maxima. Cooling on the card is pants, though, so i think i'll need to do something about that soon!
I'm also looking to overclock the CPU (having to do this manually because my main board is preety naff for overclocking - it's a GA-7VAXP). Is this likely to have a big impact on the running speed of the game and on graphics settings. I'm guessing it would just increase running speed.
Thanks again.
The card is the 256mb version, although i don't really see what extra value that would give since I'd heard that these cards are limited by the memory speed rather than the memory size. I guess that any overclocking that i can manage for the memory will help a lot on that score. I just tried using ATI tools last night to find the maximum achievable GPU and memory clock speeds but the card suffers from catastrophic failure when i run it for any length of time near these maxima. Cooling on the card is pants, though, so i think i'll need to do something about that soon!
I'm also looking to overclock the CPU (having to do this manually because my main board is preety naff for overclocking - it's a GA-7VAXP). Is this likely to have a big impact on the running speed of the game and on graphics settings. I'm guessing it would just increase running speed.
Thanks again.
Hi again Rich,
You may want to head over to the Oblivion forums Hardware & Tech Support as there are dozens of threads on Oblivion tuning and performance settings. The game has a massive INI file (found in My Documents, My Games, Oblivion) where you can custom adjust tons of facets to tune better performance better matched to individual PC's.
There are going to be slow spots in the game though- even an AMD 64 X2 with sli will have outdoors spots where the framerate nosedives to the 20-30's.. it's a very taxing game on both the CPU and GPU's.
Performance here on our low-end amd system is still pretty decent. It's got DDR-400 memories and we just picked up an XP 2800+ for dirt cheap. Any little bit you can squeek from memory, cpu or gpu has an impact in this game- just not everywhere but in spots where said bottleneck exists. The game has spots where it's cpu bound and spots where it has graphics bottlenecks.
Good luck!
You may want to head over to the Oblivion forums Hardware & Tech Support as there are dozens of threads on Oblivion tuning and performance settings. The game has a massive INI file (found in My Documents, My Games, Oblivion) where you can custom adjust tons of facets to tune better performance better matched to individual PC's.
There are going to be slow spots in the game though- even an AMD 64 X2 with sli will have outdoors spots where the framerate nosedives to the 20-30's.. it's a very taxing game on both the CPU and GPU's.
Performance here on our low-end amd system is still pretty decent. It's got DDR-400 memories and we just picked up an XP 2800+ for dirt cheap. Any little bit you can squeek from memory, cpu or gpu has an impact in this game- just not everywhere but in spots where said bottleneck exists. The game has spots where it's cpu bound and spots where it has graphics bottlenecks.
Good luck!
Thanks for the advice. I will look into the site you mentioned.
A problem i have with my motherboard is that the AGP/PCI clocks are not fixed, so when i try to increase the memory and CPU clocks the AGP/PCI clocks are also increased. I was able to get the system to run stable with the memory/CPU clock running at 176MHz (AGP 70MHz, PCI 35MHz if i remember correctly) with my previous graphics card that wasn't overclocked. If i already have the current graphics card overclocked what issues might i have if i try to overclock the memory/CPU/AGP/PCI again? I'm not sure how the AGP clock relates to the overclocked GPU/memory on the video card. For example, if i've already overclocked the graphics card to the limit, will overclocking the AGP cause the graphics card to crash or will it simply give me a further performance boost?
Thanks,
Rich
A problem i have with my motherboard is that the AGP/PCI clocks are not fixed, so when i try to increase the memory and CPU clocks the AGP/PCI clocks are also increased. I was able to get the system to run stable with the memory/CPU clock running at 176MHz (AGP 70MHz, PCI 35MHz if i remember correctly) with my previous graphics card that wasn't overclocked. If i already have the current graphics card overclocked what issues might i have if i try to overclock the memory/CPU/AGP/PCI again? I'm not sure how the AGP clock relates to the overclocked GPU/memory on the video card. For example, if i've already overclocked the graphics card to the limit, will overclocking the AGP cause the graphics card to crash or will it simply give me a further performance boost?
Thanks,
Rich
SNGX1275
Posts: 10,615 +467
I have an Athlon 64 2800+ at 1.98Ghz (rather than 1.8) with an EVGA 7800GS Superclocked card and my system struggles at 1024x768 if I don't tweak anything and just let Oblivion choose the "optimal settings".
So with that old of a processor and those video cards you are going to struggle. Before I got my 7800GS SC I had a 9600 Pro in that system, and I could play at 800x600 and I thought it played fair to ok at that, but once I got the new card the game became as beautiful as I had been hearing.
You really do need some of the latest stuff to make the game look as good as it can.
So with that old of a processor and those video cards you are going to struggle. Before I got my 7800GS SC I had a 9600 Pro in that system, and I could play at 800x600 and I thought it played fair to ok at that, but once I got the new card the game became as beautiful as I had been hearing.
You really do need some of the latest stuff to make the game look as good as it can.
CrossFire851
Posts: 714 +0
Mictlantecuhtli said:
I got this from you link to duel-core CPUs and how they perform. So what now?? (Jk, it what I say no offence intended.)
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