Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

[gothwalk]

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I had stomach upsets and no sleep last night, so took the day off from work to get better - which has more or less worked. Nina brought home a copy of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and I’ve been attempting to install it on her machine. Or rather, it installed ok, but playing it is very hard because it’s running, with everything turned right down, at a magnificent 1 frame per second, or thereabouts. It was actually worse at first - I think, it’s hard to measure - and this is with various tweaks applied. The machine is well above the minimum spec and is very nearly the recommended spec, so I have difficulty believing that hardware is the problem. If anyone knows a neat solution to this, do let me know, as it’s not playable yet.

Comments

[niallm.livejournal.com]

Are you up to tonight, or would you prefer to put it off?

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

I should be up to it. A lift would be an excellent thing, though, if such is available.

[niallm.livejournal.com]

Sure thing.

[kshandr.livejournal.com]

My first bet if my machine was doing that would be to install the latest latest latest drivers for my video card. Games have a habit of basing all their optimisations on whatever is the mostest currentest.

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

Bleeding edge drivers are in place, and tweaked to give me access to the funky extra functions - and the disabling of them too.

[mr-wombat.livejournal.com]

Time for some .ini hacks.. or hax if you prefer.

If you're using an ATI card then... well you're going to need this one in particular:
In My Documents\My Games\Oblivion open Oblivion.ini (having taken a backup) and change bUseRefractionShader=1 to bUseRefractionShader=0

Other than that, take a look at
http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_1.htm
for some more help. If the PC you're on can handle WoW then it should be able to handle this, however my own experience suggests that any resolution above 800 * 600 is not going to happen in a playable manner. Antialiasing should be low, 2X at most. Turn down all graphical settings as much as you can and work up from there but resolution and antialiasing are the big ones.