Again, my only point here is that it's a decision that's best made by the individual with many factors being weighed
Certainly. I would never argue with that.
As for Oblivion and such my current 6800U system plays it rather well at 1152x864 with most of the options set to their maximum.
EDIT: OK, 'not' maximum but High as per the article linked below. I will admit, of course, that it would be nice to play it at 1600x1200 with all settings at their max but would that be worth the expense and the trouble of rebuilding not only the hardware but the software as well?
I am pretty confident that after the upgrade to X1950PRO AGP I will be able to run Oblivion at 12x9 with nearly all settings at max. This is pretty respectable. Wouldn't you agree?
EDIT: Ah, found my old post about Oblivion performance:
"I voted 1600x1200 because I play everything I have a that resolution (WoW, FarCry, Doom3, Half Life 2, etc.) except Oblivion which brings me to Pauldh's Post....
voted 12x10 although I probably play 16x12 25% of the time. In Oblivion I have been playing 10x7 2xaa + HDR most of the time, but recently have been doing 12x10 no aa HDR also.
Paul, now you confuse me. Your machine looks more powerful than mine. 12x10 no AA, no HDR? Why? Are you looking to make sure that you never get a frame rate drop not even a little bit throughout the entire game and across 100% of locations?
Man, I play Oblivion @ 1152x864 with 4X AA and the following settings (except for the items marked with *** all of my settings correspond to HIGH
as per this article):
V-Sync - On (as per Game options)
AA 4X
Textures - Large
Tree fade - 90%
Actor fade - 50%
Item fade - 50%
Object fade - 50%
Grass distance - 50% (This one really pisses me of as I see grass being drawn as I approach locations. I would rather have it at 100% but anything higher than 60% dramatically reduces my frame rates so I leave it at "High" default level of 50%)
View distance - 100%
Distant lands - On
Distant buildings On
Distant trees - On
Interior shadows - 50%
Exterior shadows - 50%
Self shadows - Off
Shadows on grass - Off *** (would be "On" for High)
Tree canopy shadows - On
Shadow filtering - low *** (would be "High" for High)
Specular distance - 100%
Water detail - Normal
Water reflections - On
Water ripples - On
Window reflections - On
Blood decals - High
Here's my PC (nothing is overclocked):
Windows XP Pro SP-2
A-Open server tower case with fans:
1x90mm front intake @ 3200 RPM
2x80mm rear exhaust @ 1700 RPM each (top of case)
2x60mm rear exhaust @ 2400 RPM each (middle of case)
1xPCI slot rear exhaust @ 1900 RPM (bottom of case)
Antec True 550 PSU
Abit IS7 motherboard with NO NB fan (it died a week after I got the mobo. It was like 3 years ago. Running kind of hot but it works )
Pentium 4C Northwood with HT @ 3.01 GHz
CPU cooler @ 5000 RPM - Gigabyte 3D Cooler-Ultra 360 (all copper) PCU31-VH
PC3200 Dual Channel DDR-SDRAM - 1 Gb (timings by SPD 3-3-3-8 )
eGeForce 6800 Ultra 256 Mb AGP 8X @ driver default Advaced settings as per CoolBits (Image Settings - Quality) ***
SATA Seagate Barracuda 120 GB in IDE mode x 2
DVD-ROM drive
CD-RW drive
Floppy drive
Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 Gamer
Vewsonic G220fb (CRT) @ 85Hz
*** I know that Quality enables floptimizations such as Anisotropic Sample Optimization but in all honesty my eye does not see any difference in IQ with and without these optimizations, i.e when IQ is set to "High Quality."
AquaMark 3.0 Commercial Plus = 64,567
3DMark05 = 5,500 and change
I must admit that in some areas my frame rate drops to about 18-20 FPS but not for long. I must also admit that I have not explored all areas of the world of Oblivion. Still, I've played it for 40-50 hours at this point and it is very playable on my machine with these settings. It also looks pretty damn great (so far this is the best-looking game I've ever played; so even though I have not seen it in its absolute glory - who has (?) - I would state that I have not sacrificed too much of Oblivion IQ for performance)
Please, explain to me, Paul, what is wrong with this picture (I mean you having a stronger rig and it seems you are running at lower settings than I. Do you have all Video Options at 100%? )
P.S. I run a very clean system though - no more than 19 active processes at the same time (perhaps you have like 50 processes running?): All non-essential processces are disabled (see
THIS, for example), nothing's running in the background except Symantec Anti-Virus v.10.0 Corporate Edition. This thing has like 6 or 7 active processes, including Real Time virus protection which constantly scans files, even when they are simply accessed which happens a lot in a game . I am sure this slows down my PC performance a bit. I will disable the Anti-Virus at some point and re-check AquaMark and 3DMark scores. Gotta gain 5-10% I think."
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram