Guessing the system requirements

dommiel74 · Post by **dommiel74** » Wed Sep 07, 2005 1:34 pm

if you go to the oblivion forums or gamefaqs, everyone there says you must have a 7800gtx or 850xtpe just to play the game. would a company really make a game that requires everyone to purchase a $600 card?
if the devs are using a 9800pro and the game looks as good as it does, why do people say you must have such a high end card?
im running a 9600xt, and will for oblivion. I know i will not get every setting to max, but the game should still look great.
I managed to play Doom 3 with all the bells and whistles at max, though the res was 800x600. even at the low of a resolution the game still looked amazing, and there was very little difference betewwn 800x600 and 1024x768.
I would guess that i can run oblivion on 800x600 and with the settings at medium, but it should still look beautiful.

I just checked out the requirements for FEAR and it says ati radeon 9000 min. now im basing my assumption for oblivion off of the FEAR requriements, but if a 9000 is the min, a 9600xt should be med NOT min (640 res, no shadows, no detail, everything turned to the lowest setting, like the goobers at all the other forums say.) the recommended graphics card was a 9800pro.

i think people are jumping the gun ***WAYYYYY*** too much for this game.

Rookierookie · Post by **Rookierookie** » Thu Sep 08, 2005 2:04 am

Tell those people to stop pretending that they know computers just because they could tell a mouse from a keyboard. I am CERTAIN that your 9600XT is sufficient.

elyons · Post by **elyons** » Fri Sep 09, 2005 1:10 pm

You have to remember bethesda is trying to make a profit off this game, that is in fact the entire goal of publishing it. If you were in their shoes do you think it would be financialy intelligent to release a game that only a few consumers beable to afford to run. There is no game on the market at this point that actually requires a X850 or 7800. Oblivion should run fine on a much lesser card.

Dace · Post by **Dace** » Thu Sep 15, 2005 6:36 am

My best guess would be a geforece fx 5500 or better and possibly a 5900. I love the Geforce 4 Ti's as much as anyone but it will be likely that many games will dump them rather than trying to have that much lower of settings especially with the lack of decent shader technologies. Besides look at the minimum graphics requirements of Battlefield2 and it doesnt sound that out of the way to believe it will take a fairly powerful current generation graphics card.

kemi · Post by **kemi** » Tue Sep 20, 2005 6:47 pm

system requirements

My comp is about 3 months old and this is what i got in the bundle and I havent yet upgraded how do you guys think this will go playing Oblivion

512mb ram
3.0 GHz Pentium 4 processor
radeon 9550 ( if the gods of ebay smile down on me perhaps a X800 or X700)

Ramjet79 · Post by **Ramjet79** » Wed Oct 26, 2005 12:17 pm

do you think i have enough

I am worried about my video card as i cannot afford a new one, but i am hoping that the rest might make up for it. what do you all think?
athlon 64 3800+ w/ 1 gig ram, sata 150 300gig hd, geforce 4 fx 5200 with 256mb of ram. will the 256 of ram help?
thanks

Tamerlane · Post by **Tamerlane** » Fri Nov 04, 2005 12:26 am

Bethesda have a tendency for pushing the envelope, remember when Morrowind first came out back in 2002. You needed a monster of a machine to run it back then, I'm not going to upgrade mine this time but I also know that I wont be running it at maximum settings for a considerable while after its release.

JCDenton · Post by **JCDenton** » Sat Nov 05, 2005 5:45 am

Judging from the screenshots, I think that the recommended setup will be a FX-59 CPU, with some nasty 4GB PC4000 RAM and a couple of SLI water-cooled 6800Ultras or a 490mhz 7800GTX from Asus. In addition to a couple of 74GB 10000RPM Raptor Harddrives in a raid 0 setup.

The game won`t run on a Pentium EE, because of overheating and a narrow pipeline

REal953 · Post by **REal953** » Sun Nov 06, 2005 6:13 pm

I really don't think there that stupit

Bethesda wants us to by it, and unless they have some big agreement with some comuter or grafic company i think it will atleast compatibal with something a little lower. It may lose some of the great grafics promised but i think it will still be great no matter the grafics.

Tamerlane · Post by **Tamerlane** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 5:38 am

I actually read somewhere that they've tried to minimise the loading times in the outdoor regions by implementing multi-threading code. So people who have dual-core systems will definetly be able to benefit from it. Thats not to say that it won't work on a single processor machine but it would be nice to have a multi-processor setup.

Tricky · Post by **Tricky** » Mon Nov 28, 2005 6:56 am

I've been wondering for a while what kind of drain those fancy trees would be on my frame rate. As far as I can tell, Bethesda outsourced that part of the development at least partially to IDV (strange, since they take a fair bit of credit for it in various interviews), the owners of the SpeedTreeRT software that makes the forests come alive. Here's the cool part, they have a tech demo on their site;
http://www.speedtree.com/html/downloads_exe.htm

If you download the complete tech demo (134MB, though was able to d/l it in about fifteen minutes), you can get a nice impression of what it's going to be like. I can recommend the 'Dry Sierra', it gets closest to the kind of forests seen on the E3 demo of Oblivion. To those who are worried the demo might be 'light' enough to run well on any system, they've added a few extras like dynamic lightning, a few props, shaders, (sometimes localized) wind effects and a couple of moving npc's (mostly helicopters). Make no mistake, this demo is not going to level the playing field with Oblivion, but it feels nice to see this technology run so well. At least, it did well enough on my mediocre system.

So yes, as far as the system requirements go, I've become a more confident I'll be able to get nice results.

Gangrel Hound · Post by **Gangrel Hound** » Fri Dec 30, 2005 1:47 am

I'm running a 2600+ AMD with 512 MB RAM and a Geforce 4 Ti 4200 w/128MB RAM. The entire system runs at 333MHZ FSB. I am hoping this is enough for the minimums, and it looks like it will be(barely). I am confidant though in the Bethesda team. I am sure they will do a nice job of keeping the reqs as low as possible. I can run Doom3 smoothly at higher levels, so I feel I should at least be able to play Oblivion when it comes out.

theAngryWoodElf · Post by **theAngryWoodElf** » Sat Dec 31, 2005 6:17 am

Any guess on how the Centrino Performs?

laptop specs

Pentium M 2.0 ghz
1 gb Ram
X700 128 mb
100 gb hard drive
Sound Blaster audigy 2 zs

will I be able to max it out, or will the graphics card hold me back
good thing that docking station has a pci-e slot.....

Ashen · Post by **Ashen** » Sat Dec 31, 2005 9:32 am

I don't think you'll be able to max it out. I was over at B site recently looking up at some posts in relation to the sys reqs and from what I remember I don't think you'll max it out with that system but it should run all right.

I am sure they will try to keep the reqs as low as possible, but from everything we know now it will require a good system to make it run smoothly. I am not even talking about maxing out the game. We will see when it comes out in the end, I don't think there is anything to do but wait.

theAngryWoodElf · Post by **theAngryWoodElf** » Sat Dec 31, 2005 10:05 am

Ashen, I was referring to the centrinos performance on that game, and as for the laptop card, well i'm getting a 6800 for my docking station to get the full effect

Ashen · Post by **Ashen** » Sat Dec 31, 2005 1:36 pm

Ah I see. The 6800 PCI is still mid-range though, but rather high mid-range so that should be just fine. My own card is there as well so I've been looking at that.

I don't see anyone's mentioned it but this is what the standard dev machine seems to be (according to the German magazine GameStar, thanks to the B forums):

AMD AthlonXP 2500+ or 2600+ (Barton Core, 333MHz FSB)
1024MB (1GB) RAM
ATi Radeon 9800pro, AGP with 256MB video RAM

This should run the game fairly decently no? I am thinking everyone could compare their own system to this and see where they are.

aceface123 · Post by **aceface123** » Sat Jan 07, 2006 10:19 am

System Requirements

Here is the thing that we need to remember about Oblivion's system requirements. Bethesda wants to market this game to a wide range of consumers. If they make a game that is only playable on supercomputers then people who have an average system will not purchase the game. I also had read that Bethesda is making the game much like Morrowind so you can scale down graphics, but they claim to have created more options for what gets scaled down and how you do it. Oh well, we will see. The bottom line is that I REFUSE to buy an XBOX 360 so I will take whatever measures necessary to upgrade my PC.

Rookierookie · Post by **Rookierookie** » Sat Jan 07, 2006 10:52 am

The specs I mentioned in the topic post is hardly a supercomputer. That is about what I'd think is the absolute minimum for the game.

On an amusing note, true "supercomputers" and mainframes are, in fact, very unlikely to be able to run even Quake 3, let alone TES4, since they lack a fast graphics accelerator, which in the end is what really counts.

aceface123 · Post by **aceface123** » Sat Jan 07, 2006 10:58 am

It is tough to say what the minimum requirements will be. I would bet that you wouldn't be able to run the game well without 1 gig of ram. And the equivalent to a geforce 7800. You never know.

fable · Post by **fable** » Sat Jan 07, 2006 11:59 am

[QUOTE=aceface123]It is tough to say what the minimum requirements will be. I would bet that you wouldn't be able to run the game well without 1 gig of ram. And the equivalent to a geforce 7800. You never know.[/QUOTE]

Not logical--in fact, a company killer. Very few gamers have 1 GB RAM at the present time, and Bethsoft's too intelligent to require this. (And this runs counter to your own earlier statement in this thread, "Here is the thing that we need to remember about Oblivion's system requirements. Bethesda wants to market this game to a wide range of consumers. If they make a game that is only playable on supercomputers then people who have an average system will not purchase the game.") Not to mention that from past experience, they've always kept sys reqs within the higher limits of standard use. I would guess 256 MB, with 500 MB recommended.

This also applies to video cards. In fact, one of their developers has stated in an interview that everything from a Radeon 9200 will be supported. While we should always, always doubt whatever is said in a company interview regarding game features and gameplay, this kind of comment is at least worth keeping in mind.