Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Graphics Downgrade


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Source: http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.p...howtopic=226360

Also here's a newer video (with the new shadow system supposidely) released by a German gaming magazine: http://youtube.com/w/Oblivion?v=7srHUGNma5...search=oblivion

First off this affects both the 360 and PC versions, and you cannot turn them back on even if you happen to have a mega PC with SLI.

Supposidely the shadow system they had in place was far too slow so they decided to replace it with a more general shadow engine (with dynamic shadowing on characters however not on any structures or objects).

Honestly I'm not sure what to think, if you read the elder scrolls forum there's some comparison shots of the E3 2005 video to this new German video of the game.. However the german video is very low res, and it's possible it wasn't running with max visual settings..

To what extend this changes the game I dunno.. I'm a little worried, since I'll be purchasing the Collector's Edition (Xbox360) of this game. However there's no real evidence of just what impact on the graphics this will have. I'll add any good comparisons if they become available.

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-bYtE' date='Jan 29 2006, 20:11' post='587130718']

So what? You can still play the game. Just using a more simpel shadowengine doesn't turn a game from great to crap.

Of course. I'm just posting this since it is a huge game that everyone is anticipating.. And it is disapointing that we won't get the same level of graphics as we've seen in pictures/videos of Oblivion in the past.

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What do you want? Killer graphics with bad framerate, or a good graphics with smooth framerate? Sacrificing graphics for this is justificed.

I bet you that you'll not even notice it when you're playing.

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To be honest I was expecting something like this. Not in the shadows engine specifically but indeed a graphics downgrade or tweak. And I uderstand the developers. The massive world in Elder Scrolls is very big, even for today?s wild machines. They dont want another Morrowing lag-fest, heck! Morrowind runs slow even on some modern systems, 3 years before its release!

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My question would be, why don't they use a scalable shadow system, so as systems get more powerful, you can vamp up the settings? Many games run at varying degrees of visuals, I don't see why this can't be the same, unless they are rushing it out. I'd rather have a game grow with my system, than being limited by current hardware.

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It's perfectly fine. Just the 9000+ objectives don't have dynamic shadows--they still have general shadowing. Characters still have dynamic shadows.

Take a look at this quote.

Take a look at this picture.

Every piece of food, every plate, bowl, cup, fork, knife, the books, scroll, soul gems, gold coins, and winebottles, plus everything on the shelves and table in the background, is an object that you can pick up. You can read the books, you can eat the food or combine it to make potions, drink the wine, or sell all of it. Or you can take it somewhere else and put it in a pile. You can drag the items around, you can use telekinesis to manipulate them, you can hit them with your weapon, or you can fire an area effect spell at them and they'll all go flying.

OR, we could change it so that the objects are static -- there's no interaction, they're fixed in place. Instead of an apple in a bowl for example, you'd see a "bowl of apples" object that you could never move, that would act as a container and always looked full of apples even if you took all of the apples out. Either that or there's nothing there but static, non-interactive objects, and we only allow you to place items from your inventory into containers and not into the world. Because that's the type of thing we'd have to do -- on PC or on Xbox 360 -- to allow everything to cast shadows of their own.

So which is more important to you? Shadows on everything, or lots of stuff to interact with, take, drop, use, buy or sell?

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should be fine. Dynamic shadows would have been soooo brilliant for a day night system at sunset and sunrise, but I'll live without.

As for scalable shadows, I'm sure that will still be in the engine, its just that they probably needed a new system and even with scalability there was probably issues with all objects using dynamic shadows. Current FPS that support dynamic shadows take a pretty hefty performance hit as a result, so consider a world with 1000's of objects on screen at once and the amount of calculations that needs to be done every microsecond just to render the shadows. It would be mindboggling and itd be some time until hardware could do it at a good speed I would think.

The developers of Fear said that the dynamic shadows caused a real performance loss when you had to many light sources in the environment (they quoted a relatively low number like 5 or 7 i think). Now remember this game was 95% indoors. Just imagine a countryside with a forest and lamp post spread apart for miles into the distance, each emitting their own source of light or a town at night with complex architecture and every house emiting lights through their windows and street lights. The performance hit would be incredible and I reckon by the time hardware could manage this the rest of the game would look outdated anyway.

I think its a sensible design decision

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Dosn't matter for me it's an RPG and will still have amazing graphics. I do kinda wish they could have kept the dynamic shadows system for everything just as an option for people with high end cards in a few years time.

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I am all for the change. Its all for the better for most people and the reason I loved the last game was due to the gameplay and not the graphics. Hope the gameplay will be as good in Oblivion and the sweet graphics are just a tasty bonus.

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Not really worried about this. Usually when I play games on PC I just turn off Shadows lol

Cant wait for this game. Fight Night in Feb and Oblivion in March,hopefully :yes:

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-bYtE' date='Jan 29 2006, 20:20' post='587130745']

What do you want? Killer graphics with bad framerate, or a good graphics with smooth framerate? Sacrificing graphics for this is justificed.

I bet you that you'll not even notice it when you're playing.

could not have said it any better myself. completly took the words out of my mouth. :)

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its wierd that they would remove it totally tho... I'm on a development team mucking around with dynamic shadows... with my system.. I'm able to deal with 100 million + polys and full dynamic shadows in the scene with no slowdown.. but.... they should leave it intact.. but just use 2 shadow systems.. one for closeups and one for distance drawing.. it's not that hard >.<

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-bYtE' date='Jan 29 2006, 19:20' post='587130745'] What do you want? Killer graphics with bad framerate, or a good graphics with smooth framerate? Sacrificing graphics for this is justificed.

I bet you that you'll not even notice it when you're playing.

how about an option? :whistle:

Advance Shadows: enable or disable. good PC can do it

screw the consoles

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how about an option? :whistle:

Advance Shadows: enable or disable. good PC can do it

screw the consoles

have you played it? How do you know even a good PC can handle it. Dynamic shadows are one of the primary reasons games like Doom 3 and Fear requirte pretty beefy PC's and they have very limited play areas being based primary indoors. A countryside with hundrews of thousands of polygons at once would kill most PC's I bet.

As for having the option I doubt its that easy for them to just implement a dual system this late into development. If the PCs COULD actually manage it and doing a dual system was just a matter of adding 3 lines to the code I'm sure they would have done it. As it is it's to late for any major code rewrites and for something like this that wont effect the gameplay it isnt really worth delaying the game.

edit: and anything they do add or change now will just mean additional time thats needed to test the game which coulddelay it by a number of weeks or potentially months.

Edited by Smigit
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this may be useful for some people who havent seen it yet

What are the PC system requirements? New!

Recommended:

* 3 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent processor

* 1 GB System RAM

* ATI X800 series, NVIDIA GeForce 6800 series, or higher video card

Minimum System Requirements:

* Windows XP

* 512MB System RAM

* 2 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent processor

* 128MB Direct3D compatible video card

* and DirectX 9.0 compatible driver;

* 8x DVD-ROM drive

* 4.6 GB free hard disk space

* DirectX 9.0c (included)

* DirectX 8.1 compatible sound card

* Keyboard, Mouse

Supported Video Card Chipsets:

* ATI X1900 series

* ATI X1800 series

* ATI X1600 series

* ATI X1300 series

* ATI X850 series

* ATI x800 series

* ATI x700 series

* ATI x600 series

* ATI Radeon 9800 series

* ATI Radeon 9700 series

* ATI Radeon 9600 series

* ATI Radeon 9500 series

* NVIDIA GeForce 7800 series

* NVIDIA GeForce 6800 series

* NVIDIA GeForce 6600 series

* NVIDIA GeForce 6200 series

* NVIDIA GeForce FX series

http://elderscrolls.com/games/oblivion_faq.htm

They actually arent too high all things considered. I should get a decent framerate at least on my sys

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  • 4 years later...

Dosn't matter for me it's an RPG and will still have amazing graphics. I do kinda wish they could have kept the dynamic shadows system for everything just as an option for people with high end cards in a few years time.

Exactly.

The game would look a lot better with dynamic shadows. And would run just fine on my GTX285 OC. I guess I will just keep playing Morrowind and Crysis... *sigh*

What do you want? Killer graphics with bad framerate, or a good graphics with smooth framerate? Sacrificing graphics for this is justificed.

I bet you that you'll not even notice it when you're playing.

Why not have both?

how about an option? :whistle:

Advance Shadows: enable or disable. good PC can do it

screw the consoles

Exactly... too bad more and more games are geared for consoles first.

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