I recently bought a single vanilla EVGA GTX 480 and threw it in my gaming rig with a Core i7 920 overclocked to 3.4GHz and 6GB G.Skill. And even more recently added 2 128GB C300 SSDs in RAID-0, then reinstalled Win 7, optimized the OS, it's FAST, blah blah blah.
Been playing Oblivion for a while since then and it's been great, of course. Maxed all of the settings, even tweaked a few Oblivion.ini settings for some more graphical goodness. In the last couple weeks I've been using the EVGA Precision tool, which helps me know how much of the video card is being used. It also measures temps, fan speed, and allows you to control fan speed and clock speeds but I haven't messed with those. To my surprise, Oblivion will use as much as 86% of my GPU in some situations. I have the driver sitting at 4x AA and 16x AF so that will bring utilization up naturally.
In the past few days I've been using the latest NVidia drivers which allow Ambient Occlusion and I read that it works well with Oblivion. I figured the GTX 480 would have enough headroom to use the Quality setting, especially for a 4 year old game, so I pumped it up to Quality. Again, to my surprise, the GPU was hitting 99% a lot more often, mostly in wooded areas. Choppiness ensued. I bumped it down to Performance and there were more shadow anomolies than having it shut off completely, but performance was slightly better. I ultimately shut it off because of the anomolies (most notibly was a definied square shadow area that looked a lot better without AO).
Moral of the story: Oblivion is still a force to be reckoned with, and even moreso with Ambient Occlusion turned on. However, you can make the game look AMAZING even without making any changes to the skins. If you enable precision shadows, force SM3.0 (which apparently does nothing for graphics quality in Oblivion), enable Ambient Occlusion, and forcing full LOD (level of detail) on trees, things do look a lot better, but the game slows down considerably. I would say that 95% of the slowdown occured with AO enabled. Enabling precision shadows, tree LOD, and SM3 didn't seem to hit performance much at all.
Just my 2c, I will continue to tweak and test as time goes on. I still love this game
Been playing Oblivion for a while since then and it's been great, of course. Maxed all of the settings, even tweaked a few Oblivion.ini settings for some more graphical goodness. In the last couple weeks I've been using the EVGA Precision tool, which helps me know how much of the video card is being used. It also measures temps, fan speed, and allows you to control fan speed and clock speeds but I haven't messed with those. To my surprise, Oblivion will use as much as 86% of my GPU in some situations. I have the driver sitting at 4x AA and 16x AF so that will bring utilization up naturally.
In the past few days I've been using the latest NVidia drivers which allow Ambient Occlusion and I read that it works well with Oblivion. I figured the GTX 480 would have enough headroom to use the Quality setting, especially for a 4 year old game, so I pumped it up to Quality. Again, to my surprise, the GPU was hitting 99% a lot more often, mostly in wooded areas. Choppiness ensued. I bumped it down to Performance and there were more shadow anomolies than having it shut off completely, but performance was slightly better. I ultimately shut it off because of the anomolies (most notibly was a definied square shadow area that looked a lot better without AO).
Moral of the story: Oblivion is still a force to be reckoned with, and even moreso with Ambient Occlusion turned on. However, you can make the game look AMAZING even without making any changes to the skins. If you enable precision shadows, force SM3.0 (which apparently does nothing for graphics quality in Oblivion), enable Ambient Occlusion, and forcing full LOD (level of detail) on trees, things do look a lot better, but the game slows down considerably. I would say that 95% of the slowdown occured with AO enabled. Enabling precision shadows, tree LOD, and SM3 didn't seem to hit performance much at all.
Just my 2c, I will continue to tweak and test as time goes on. I still love this game