Papy on 11/4/2006 at 01:43
I agree that a minimum of 0 fps could be a bit tricky... :joke:
belfong on 11/4/2006 at 03:41
Does more RAM help improve Oblivion? I have a 1GB RAM and I'm wondering if I should upgrade to 2GB. I own a GeForce 6800-128mb AGP card.
Malygris on 11/4/2006 at 17:31
Friend of mine has a system very similar to mine, slightly higher-end video card (Radeon 9700 vs 9500) but with only 512 meg of RAM, compared to my one gig. Based on our talks, I'm getting noticeably higher framerates than he is, and I have a few options (draw distance, shadows) cranked up a little higher than he does. Anecdotal, but it does seem to have a fair impact.
Shevers on 11/4/2006 at 20:41
As a rule, RAM will have a pretty big influence on any game speed. Plus pretty much all of the time it will be the cheapest way to increase performance. God knows how much better Half-Life 2, for example, plays on this 768mb machine than the 512mb I used to play it on.
PeeperStorm on 12/4/2006 at 01:20
I'm told that having more RAM will reduce delays while areas and textures load, since they load from the buffer instead of the hard drive. Beyond that I dunno.
Aerothorn on 12/4/2006 at 01:23
According to Gamespot's tests on their Oblivion tech guide ((
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6147127/index.html):)
"System memory makes a difference in Oblivion, but the performance benefits don't show up in the benchmarks. More memory helps the game load new scenes quickly and minimizes the hitching associated with excessive hard drive thrashing. We run our tests multiple times, to ensure consistency, but that allows the game to spread the initial memory loading hit across multiple runs. Our initial run with the 512MB system scored 29 frames per second--four frames slower than the final average result. Adding memory will help reduce the severity of that initial hit.
The performance difference between 1GH and 2GB of RAM is even more subtle. Once we had more memory, we noticed that the game stuttered less while dynamically loading adjacent areas in the overworld. "
On the framerate area, it ran significantly lower on 512 MB RAM (33 FPS) than on 1 GB (40 FPS), but ran the same on 2 GB (40 FPS again).
Lacerta on 12/4/2006 at 08:23
Good to know - I'll put my money into a new graphics card rather than RAM.
Unless of course processor speed is more important than graphics card (I think this is unlikely as I have a Radeon 9600).
Shevers on 12/4/2006 at 11:18
Yes, I'd definitely go for the new graphics card. I only recently got one and the improvement was incredible from a Radeon 9600 to even a midrange card. Since you have the money, the graphics card is definitely the best buy on this occasion :thumb:
Dirty_Brute on 15/4/2006 at 01:54
I am thinking about picking up an AMD system this weekend. It will be cheaper for me to go AMD because I would be able to use the same memory from my old AGP setup. Going an Intel path would force me to get DDR2 memory.
What do you guys think of these parts? I am upgrading from a Pentium 4 Prescott 3 ghz, 7800 GS, and Asus P4P SE AGP motherboard.
I am upgrading mostly to get a decent framerate for Oblivion and to finally get a PCI-Express setup.
-AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ CPU
-Abit KN8 Motherboard
-PNY 7900 GT PCI-Express
belfong on 15/4/2006 at 14:14
Anyone has a widescreen LCD? I recently bought one. Oblivion looks fantastic in widescreen.. except that my GeForce 6800 is too slow for the 1680x1050 resolution :(
