READ THIS IF YOUR IN DOUBT OF YOUR PC HARDWARE! CAREFULLY SET THE VIDEO OPTIONS AND YOU'LL BE FINE! EXCEL

User Rating: 10 | The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion PC
Well let me just say that I love PC games and especially enjoy PC RPG’s using keyboard and mouse and what will have the XBOX360 owners whinnig and PC gamers playing uncountable hours, of course the PC modding community. So its clear that getting an XBOX360 for me never even crossed my mind especially if it was only for just one game which I can also get in PC. On the downside I knew what I was getting into since OBLIVION is a MONSTER at chugging resources and my PC can be best called mid-range. I have the following:

Athon XP 2600 oc’d at just under 2.1 GHz (1.9 stock)
1 GB PC2700 RAM
Gigabyte 6600GT OC (factory oc’ed)

WARNING: This is my personal opinion and we all know that no 2 computers perform alike even if they do have the same hardware so take this as friendly advice and not TECH Support.

After installing and all the game decides to give me Med Quality video settings, I think that aint that bad. First few minutes of the game after intro I nearly screamed in horror, the graphics were terrible (and I mean terrible as in Wizardry 8 old), true framerate was solid but I couldn’t play the game this way it would be a crime againts gaming and an insult to my PC.

So I said screw the reccomended setting and headed to the video options. Turns out medium to some sick joker is a resolution of 614 X 460. Give me a break! Not even 600x800?! So I turned it up to 800x600 and it still ran well but didn’t look nice enough for me, so I turned it up to 1280x1024 and bam! there was the nice screenshots I’d seen. I set off happily enjoying the eye candy in the tutorial mission following guards and emperor and soon enough they get attacked my framerates take a huge dive. Everytime we were attacked my system would chug until the enemies were dead.

Already hooked on the eye candy I couldn’t go back to jagged characters and objects, so I hit the Video options once more. Reluctant to ease up on the resolution I hit the other optios. First I changed textures size from HIGH to MEDIUM … hell if the XBOX360 runs them on medium why is it set to high on my PC. Then I turned down a couple of particle and shadow effects not completely off but in the ¼ region (they were half way originally), next turned down the Blood and the Draw Distance for foliage (If you’ve read reviews youd know that the grass and foliage fades in as you walk around at a certain radius and Oblivion’s graphics have gotten picked on because of that), so hell whats a few feet closer to me if I’m gonna see them fade in anyways.

After careful tunning of all the above Oblivion now runs for me at 1280x1024 at a nice framerate and still looks amazing. Sure its not all shiny and shadowy but still beats out most RPGs and MMOs for that matter in the visuals. So in conclusion what started out as an ugly duckling and a nightmare to me, ended up beautiful (mind you not screenshot nice, but nice none the less)

I hope this helps you tweak your settings if you already have the game and are running it on the recommended settings. And if you don’t have it and don’t wanna dish out for a new XBOX360 but are un sure of your system, this is an amazing game that you can still enjoy with Mid-range hardware. Honestly I’ve only put on like 5 hours into the game but if this is anything like Morrowind I’ll still be playing this game by the time I can cough up for a new CPU and Video Card. DON’T MISS OUT! ....I'm off to waste more endless hours in this awesome world!