Oblivion settings in my 9300/7800GTX Go

Hey guys..

I wanted to share what settings I was using in Oblivion. I spent a lot of time getting to this point so I wanted to share my findings. Maybe this could help out others. Maybe we could discuss other things that might help out.

I have tried the tweak guides that are posted at various sites. I found that most of the settings actually made my perf worse. I made sure that I was testing the outside, water, and inside in all my tests. I tried to make sure that I was getting at least 30 FPS in all areas and if I didn't, I tried to make adjustments to my settings. Some places the framerates went down to the low 20s, but I felt that the situation was ok. I was near shops and such in the city that is near the opening of the sewers where you come out of. Around this area is where I did all of my testing.

Application Specific Color Profiles Tip:
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To get the application specific color profiles to work, there are one and maybe two things that you need to do to get it to work like it should. If you're using any variation of the Extreme-G MobileForce drivers, you need to set the service called "NVIDIA Display Driver Service" to Automatic and start the service. This service is required to make this work. If you don't have this service working, you won't get any color profile changes between applications/games. Once I had this service running, I was able to get the custom color profiles to work for application specific settings but I ran into another problem. After I would reboot and then run a game, the specific color profile settings for that game wouldn't go into effect. I did more research and it appears this has been a bug in the nVidia drivers since around version 66. Some guy found out what was causing the problem and wrote a little program to fix it. I've tested this out and it works great. Now I can have custom color profiles per application, and they load fine between reboots. The tool is called NV Color Profiler. Read the included Readme file for more information on what the problem is and how this program fixes it. It also describes how to set it up so it'll fix the problem between reboots. I used a delay of 3000 as described in the text file and that seemed to work fine for me (DELAYSAVE3000). Read the readme and it'll make sense.

If someone would like to test out my settings on their 9300/7800 rig, just please share your experiences, I'd love to hear them. Thanks for listening, here are my settings:


Oblivion "Good Starting Point" Settings
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Required Setup:
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The reason there is some setup for some of you is to ensure that you have a clean and unmodified .ini files. Rename your oblivion.ini and BlendSettings.ini files that are in the "My Documents\My Games\Oblivion" directory and start up Oblivion. It will do an auto detection of your hardware. This will ensure that you are using a clean ini file just as I am. Then after this, just set all the settings to what I have below from within the game. Be sure to turn VSync off, and to turn on 16x AF in the driver.

My system specs:
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Inspiron 9300, 2.4GHz, 2GB Ram, 7800 GTX Go 256MB (440/1250)
Dell 7800 GTX Driver v.A00
For further details see my sig.

My video driver forces these settings:
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Anisotropic filtering: 16x
VSync: Off (You can force this in the driver, or set it in the game settings)

Recommended Oblivion.ini changes:
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Deleting everything after the = sign in the below lines stops the game from showing the movies when you first start the game. This just makes things a bit faster since you don't have to manually skip all that stuff when you first run the game.

SMainMenuMovieIntro=
SIntroSequence=

Recommended Mods:
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Install the mods listed under "

Highly Recommended Mods". These mods change the landscape when you're outside and makes it look a ton better. If you run without this mod and you look out at the lands around you, they'll pretty much look like a blurry mess which is pretty much a downer.

With the above sets of mods, be sure that you enable everything in the game. To do this, when you first start the game, click "Data Files" and check all of the checkboxes to turn everything on.

Oblivion settings:
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Resolution: 1280x800
Brightness: Set to your taste
VSync: Off
Texture Size: Large
Tree Fade: Maximum
Actor Fade: Maximum
Item Fade: Maximum
Object Fade: Maximum
Grass Distance: Maximum
View Distance: Maximum
Distant Land: On
Distant Buildings: On
Distant Trees: On
Int. Shadows: Leave at the default (Don't move it)
Ext. Shadows: Leave at the default (Don't move it)
Self Shadows: Off
Shadows on Grass: Off
Tree Canopy Shadows: On
Shadow Filtering: Off
Specular Dist: Maximum
HDR Lighting: Off
Bloom Lighting: On
Water Detail: High
Water Reflections: On
Water Ripples: On
Window Reflections: On
Blood Decals: High
Anti-aliasing: 4x

If you have a config that you think is the best, please let us know about it here. Maybe we can share our configs and come up with some settings that'll work well for others.

Oblivion Good Starting Point Settings Revision Log:
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v0.1, 4-12-2006, First version, asking for feedback
v0.2, 4-16-2006, Added recommended mods, ini file changes, and formatting
v.03, 4-16-2006, Added info about application specific color profiles
v.04, 4-16-2006, Updated info regarding application specific color profiles
v.05, 4-17-2006, Removed Natural Environments from mods list

I turned off HDR because it made things look too washed out, especially in that city near the exit from the sewers. Things were blinding white, even the faces of NPCs. Using bloom made things look a bit better.

Can you guys post your settings so I can give them a test drive? Please list all the mods that you have installed as well.

I wanted to be able to see things far away so thats why I lowered the resolution and used AA 4x. When I turned the sliders down, I didn't like that I couldn't see things, ya know?

I'm also using the Dell 7800 GTX driver.

Yeah, that city I was in really looked like 4ss when I had HDR on. Bloom and AA 4x look great. Did you try 4x AA? I didn't have any decrease in perf when I would go from 2 to 4x so you may want to give it a try and see. What res are you running at?


I haven't done any recent tests with these settings, let me test again and I'll get back to you. Btw, to test this, start with a new game, and let the character sit there. The camera will start to pan around you in the starting jail cell. This makes for a lot of heat. Btw, run it in windowed mode too so you can monitor fangui. Running in windowed mode doesn't seem to change the temps at all because the GPU is still having to do the same amount of work. I'll check to make sure though on this run just to double check. This way we can all use the same reference point for temps in Oblivion. If someone has a better idea on how to get a common point to test with, please let us know. I'll have results in a bit.


Yeah, it would really be nice if someone did that on our laptops with a 7800GTX in there. I'm sure it would work well for the most of us.

The one thing that I really wanted to accomplish was being able to see far away with the best looking graphics that I could get. Going higher than 1280x800 just didn't give me much more because with 4x AA, things look really nice, and I can see far away.

Ok, so using my settings the highest temp was 83c in fangui (89c in nVidia's temp). This is with my card overclocked to 440/1250 as well. I can't say how important it is to get your AS5 applied correctly. I even ran it in fullscreen mode just to be sure. Now I'm going to run it again in windowed mode to see if it gets up to the same temp. I'll report back soon.

Btw, I'd love it if someone would use my settings and let me know what you think about them. :-)

I made a heatsink for the ram and wasn't impressed at all. All it did was take the video card longer to heat up. It still heated up to the same final temp. The main problem here is that we need to be able to get the heat out of the case faster than we are. All the memory heatsink is doing is storing that heat in the copper with it nowhere to go. Once the heatsinks heat up, then the card goes back to the same ol temps. If we had more air moving through the case, then those heatsinks would work a lot better. So what am I saying here? Save your frustration on the memory heatsinks. It took a long time, and it was a royal pain in the butt. Stick with just the shim.

Thanks, I'd like to hear what you think about my settings. I think they look great and you have a really hard time telling that you're running at 1280x800.

Btw, I ran Oblivion for 1 hour in windowed mode and my temps reached 84c in fangui and 90c in nVidia's control panel. You really need to let Oblivion run for an hour to get a good reading. And it looks like windowed mode is just as hard on the GPU as my temps were the same. My previous reading of 89c was because I didn't let it run for an hour. What's cool about this is that you get the same heat, and you can see fangui at the same time. Also make sure that you set your display to never turn off. If the display turns off, the temps will go way down.

Interesting.. I'll have to take a look at those settings and turn HDR back on to see what kind of perf it gives me. Thanks for the info. :-) I'll post back my results.

You know, I just had a thought.. Maybe we could aim at making a couple different "Profiles" for our systems with 7800 GTX cards in them. From what I've seen, at one end of the spectrum you have sight distance of things in the game, and on the other end you have visual quality. For instance in my config, we could use this as the one to see the farthest. Others that aren't concerned about sight distance would want to turn those down and turn up the quality. Maybe have three profiles. One for "Far sighted", "Middle Sighted", and one for "Near Sighted". Obviously the near sighted profile would have everything turned all the way up. This also would be limited to the controls in the game, without any ini tweaks. These things would only be a starting point for people.

What do you guys think? Then we could have stock setting profiles that people could use out of the box and it would favor their preference (to a point).

Where do I get these mods from? I'll check'em out tonight.

Hmm, well, whatever it is, it looks like crapola to me. :-/ I gave HDR another try last night and I still think 4x AA and Bloom look a lot better. Owell.