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Phil5000
Keeper of the Gates
Joined: 11 Mar 2004
Posts: 115
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| I need performance comparisons, fellas. |
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I've just started the game and it's basically unplayable. I'm still in the prison cell at the beginning and it's really choppy and sluggish. It must run better than this! I'm wondering if there's something screwy on my machine. Can you guys tell me what specs you have and how it's running for you? The first time I ran it it did an auto detect of my system and set everything to high. Why then does it run so bad? And is there a way to set it to Medium or Low without fiddling with all the individual controls?
Thanks
Win XP Home. Athlon 3500+, Nvidia Geforce 6800, 1 gig RAM.
1024 x 768, 2x AA. |
Tue Mar 28, 2006 2:23 pm |
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Danicek
The Old One
Joined: 15 Dec 2001
Posts: 5922
Location: Czech Republic |
It should really run faster on your rig (I don't have the game yet, however I read many posts about performance on 6800 GPU's).
There must be something wrong with your computer. Try to shut down as much background apps/processes/services as you can. Also check for latest drivers.
See the tips sticky post at the top of the page. I posted there performance tip that I believe may be quite useful for you. |
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Tue Mar 28, 2006 3:07 pm |
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ToddMcF2002
Leader of the Senate
Joined: 10 Jan 2005
Posts: 317
Location: Boston MA |
If you are running 2xAA then you altered the default settings right? I don't have an NVidia card but the default should have been HDR on and AA off? Try resetting to default again in the launcher. Did you mess with anything else?
BTW Nvidia released a driver for Oblivion specifically. Have you installed it?
_________________
"For Innos!" |
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Tue Mar 28, 2006 3:48 pm |
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Sir Markus
Counselor of the King
Joined: 11 Jan 2002
Posts: 369
Location: Columbus, Ohio USA |
Our system specs are nearly identical. I'm using a 3.2 ghz Pentium, an Nvidia 6800 GT, and 1 gig of ram. Windows XP Pro. and I run my games at 1280 x 960. For me, Oblivion runs nicely, even with 2x anti-aliasing enabled, and most of the features turned on. I turned down some of the shadow effects.
Just a few suggestions. Make sure you don't have bunch of stuff running in the background. Lot's of programs enable themselves to start up when windows starts. Also, Nvidia just released a new set of video drivers a day or two before Oblivion was released, so if you haven't done it, download and install those. Run antivirus/antispyware. Do a scandisk and then a defrag. Also, if you've had your operating system in use for a long time, it may just be time to do a complete reformat and reinstall; sometimes that's the best thing, but only as a last resort. You have a pretty nice computer and shouldn't be having that many problems running this game in my opinion.
The thing that makes me think you have something wrong with your machine is if you are chugging along like that in the initial dungeons and it's unplayable, just wait until you get outside and the computer has to churn out those graphics.
Last edited by Sir Markus on Tue Mar 28, 2006 7:36 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Tue Mar 28, 2006 4:41 pm |
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blgrssby
Village Dweller
Joined: 09 Jan 2006
Posts: 11
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I had that same problem on my son's year old AMD system. (Don't have the specs with me on the CPU speed but it has a 6600GT and 1GB RAM and XP64.) Once I entered the tutorial dungeon it was fine. Seems to be something about that jail cell one starts in that hammers it.
After reading some of the tweaking topics on the Elder Scroll forums it's starting to seem like this game prefers the Intel processors over AMD. I could be wrong, but most people who seem to post the best luck with the optimizations are mostly on Intel systems.
On my new AMD system - Athlon 64 X2 4400+ with a 6800GT and 2 gig of RAM my system becomes almost unplayable around Daedric shrines. (Think that is what they are.) HDR kills the frame rates for the most part and even with Bloom and 4xAA set anything above 1024 gets crummy frame rates. It's a new system and running X64 so I can't use the beta Nvidia drivers. I'd think it was set up wrong, but it seems lots of people on the Elder Scroll forums with AMD based system are hurting.
The one thing I did that helped a lot is use the tweak that thins out the grass. My kid doesn't like the grass everywhere and turned it off and things run smoothly outdoors for him. |
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Tue Mar 28, 2006 6:37 pm |
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Sir Markus
Counselor of the King
Joined: 11 Jan 2002
Posts: 369
Location: Columbus, Ohio USA |
I've used AMD chips in past computers and have been impressed with their performance. My guess is it's not about the chipset, but some other anomaly causing your trouble. I'd put my money on unnecessary resident programs, maybe a bad ram chip, or something like that. If you cant solve your problem through conventional means, re-formatting and re-installing your OS, while a pain in the backside, can really help resolve issues like this.
Last edited by Sir Markus on Tue Mar 28, 2006 7:26 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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Tue Mar 28, 2006 7:21 pm |
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Dhruin
Stranger In A Strange Land
Joined: 20 May 2002
Posts: 1825
Location: Sydney, Australia |
P4 3Ghz, 2Gb, 6800gs. Runs pretty well for me. Since originally starting, I've turned off HDR and shadows, thinned the grass (see the .ini tweak in the mods news on the front page), extended the object draw distance and turned on 2x AA.
Indoors really should run quite well, so if you can't get the tutorial dungeon right, something may well be wrong.
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Editor @ RPGDot |
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Tue Mar 28, 2006 7:23 pm |
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HoLoPo1nT
Eager Tradesman
Joined: 21 Jan 2006
Posts: 25
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The only part of the game my machine has had problems with is the intro cut-scene. I Esc'd past that and everything else has been running pretty smoothly after some modifications. The game detected High Quality for my system but I've since dropped some things down due to poor frames at times...in general it runs beautifully now.
My system spec's:
Mobo: Gigabyte Tech GA K8U ULi M1689 chipset
RAM: 1024 MB DDR400
Vid: eVGa GeForce 6800 GS 256MB, 8x AGP
CPU: AMD Sempron 3400+
All of my drivers are the most current available since I just recently swapped out my old mobo, RAM and CPU with the ones listed above.
The game does seem to crash at random when I'm Exiting Game but this isn't a huge deal since I'm leaving the game anyways and havn't looked to see if this is a general bug or not.
Laters,
HoLo |
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Wed Mar 29, 2006 1:36 am |
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Phil5000
Keeper of the Gates
Joined: 11 Mar 2004
Posts: 115
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Thanks everyone. Now I'm really depressed. I had another play with it and it might not be as bad as I first thought but it is sluggish even inside. I'll play it with FRAPS running so I can take a note of the frame rate, if some of you guys could do the same that would be sweet.
I just had XP Home installed, previously I had Win 2000. I don't think they did a very clean install because all my folders and stuff are there. I have a tech-head friend, I'll ask him to format my drive and reinstall XP. I'll use those new Nvidia drivers too.
Is there anything in XP that gamers usually remove for performance? I've turned off Windows Firewall and atuo update and screen saver and there aren't any other programs running but there are tons of processes being loaded. I think I can stream line that but I don't have my modem going so I can't get online to find out which ones I can get rid of.
Thanks again for your help. |
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Wed Mar 29, 2006 3:25 am |
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cfmdobbie
High Emperor
Joined: 01 Jul 2002
Posts: 1859
Location: London, England |
I don't tend to disable anything at all. I'd especially recommend leaving your firewall and antivirus running, and Windows update doesn't kick in nearly enough to be a problem.
I don't think Win2K was great for games anyway - XP Home is much better.
XP will as standard have quite a few things running, but most of them are small tasks that won't affect you in the slightest. Counting right now, I have 34 processes detected in Task Manager. Just watch the numbers in the CPU, CPU Time and Mem Usage columns - CPU Time is the most interesting one, enable it through View > Select Columns. If anything takes more than 20 seconds of CPU Time in any half-hour period that isn't System or System Idle Process, investigate it as a possible CPU hog.
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Charlie Dobbie
=Member of The Nonflamers' Guild=
=Moderator of the Morrowind/Oblivion Forums= |
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Wed Mar 29, 2006 8:51 pm |
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Graham 2
High Emperor
Joined: 29 Jan 2004
Posts: 795
Location: Preston/England |
I wouldn't mind some suggestions for upgrading my PC.
I know I'll need more RAM, I have a mere 256 at the moment but how much is enough?
AS for a graphics card I have a Nvidia GeForce4 MX 440 AGP 8X, whether that is any good, I don't know
The processor is an AMD XP 2700+
If I need a new graphics card and processor aswell I may well get a cross box 360, It'll be less hassle and cheaper that way.
_________________
R.I.P "Dimebag" Darrell Lance Abbott
1966 - 2004 |
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Thu Mar 30, 2006 1:54 am |
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Danicek
The Old One
Joined: 15 Dec 2001
Posts: 5922
Location: Czech Republic |
@Graham 2
Provided that you have quite decent CPU, your computer may be worth upgrading (although buying new computer is still the better way).
You certainly need to upgrade RAM and I think you need 1024. 512 won't do it.
Another thing you certainly need is GPU. You have AGP slot, so there're not so many choices out there anymore. I would suggest 6600GT. That's probably best cheap choice to old rig like yours. |
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Thu Mar 30, 2006 7:20 am |
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Phil5000
Keeper of the Gates
Joined: 11 Mar 2004
Posts: 115
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I'm looking into reformatting and reinstalling windows, but I'm thinking maybe it'd be better to buy a new hard drive. So here's a question (and excuse me if it seems kind of a silly question)... can a hard drive impact on game performance? Can an old one slow a game down? Mine's a seagate barracuda 40 gig. I don't know what model or speed but it's a few years old. If it can be an issue what should you look for when choosing a new drive? Is it the speed, for instance 7200 rpm?
Many thanks. |
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Thu Mar 30, 2006 11:36 am |
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Danicek
The Old One
Joined: 15 Dec 2001
Posts: 5922
Location: Czech Republic |
@Phil5000
Hardriver is quite ofter very important for game's performance. Bad is that people usually don't pay much attention to choose the right one and they focus on GPU, CPU and RAM.
The important thing here is your motherboard and its HD interface support. There are many types out there (IDE, SATA, SATAII, SCSI...).
What you need to know is what your motherboard supports and go for the fastest one. I can personally strongly suggest SATAII (make sure both motherboard and hardriver supports it). It theoretically doubles data transfer rate in comparison with SATAI. And also practically the difference may be observed quite easily.
If you can get your MB specs and supported interfaces, you can post it and we may elaborate further.
Oblivion is very "harddriver intensive" game as was Morrowind, so data subsystem performance is even more important in this case. |
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Thu Mar 30, 2006 11:56 am |
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Moriendor
Black Ring Leader
Joined: 19 Jul 2001
Posts: 1306
Location: Germany |
quote:
Originally posted by Danicek
@Phil5000
Hardriver is quite ofter very important for game's performance. Bad is that people usually don't pay much attention to choose the right one and they focus on GPU, CPU and RAM.
The important thing here is your motherboard and its HD interface support. There are many types out there (IDE, SATA, SATAII, SCSI...).
What you need to know is what your motherboard supports and go for the fastest one. I can personally strongly suggest SATAII (make sure both motherboard and hardriver supports it). It theoretically doubles data transfer rate in comparison with SATAI. And also practically the difference may be observed quite easily.
If you can get your MB specs and supported interfaces, you can post it and we may elaborate further.
Oblivion is very "harddriver intensive" game as was Morrowind, so data subsystem performance is even more important in this case.
I'd have to disagree slightly on this one, Dani  .
Sure, if you have lots of cash to spend then get that WD Raptor 10K RPM drive but it's not really necessary for gaming.
Any modern hard drive with 7.2K RPM should do. The hard drive only affects your level loading times and a WD Raptor is still only loading 3-5 seconds faster in Battlefield 2 for example (which has crazy long loading times to begin with).
The interface (IDE, SATA or SATA2) is also of minor importance. An IDE drive can transfer 100MB/s. Fast disks read data at around 50-60MB/s. As you can see, the bandwidth is not fully used even with an "old" IDE drive.
Then why is there a performance gap between IDE and SATA and SATA2? It's because the drive architecture has changed as well. Modern SATA and SATA2 drives have more features (cache optimizations, NCQ etc) that older IDE drives simply don't have.
Aside from that, if you look at benchmarks, you will see that the difference in performance between 7.2K IDE drives and 7.2K SATA or SATA2 drives is pretty negligible overall.
What you might want to consider though is capacity. Even modern drives still lose performance at approximately 50% capacity and above. It's a slow performance drop at first but it gets worse and worse towards the end of the drive. So, as a very general rule of thumb, it might be a good idea to get a drive that is approximately twice as large as what you will really need.
With that said, I got an "old" 80GB IDE hard drive with 7.2K RPM and I also have the "No Load" mod for Oblivion installed (so you don't get spammed with on-screen loading messages all the time) and no I usually can't tell when the game is loading a new area... for two reasons, not just the obvious one . |
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Thu Mar 30, 2006 12:59 pm |
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