# Level of Detail - Up or Down?



## SeeK (Mar 29, 2006)

I'm playing Oblivion. And you'd think if you buy a graphics card for $750, every game in the world will run smoothly at max settings. Hell no. Therefore, I want to do everything to get it flow better without having to significantly decrease visual quality. I've already messed around in the.ini and it helped a bit. But I can't sacrifice any more settings in the .ini.

About the Level of Detail setting in ATI Tool... if I want to increase FPS, should I bring it up or down?


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## Tatty_One (Mar 29, 2006)

First thing I would do before that IMO is to drop the Anti-aliasing down one notch...ie if you are on  say 6x drop it down to 4x that should reduce the load on your card by around 10% alone, see if it makes a difference.  I can's speak for oblivion but normally providing you are using some level of AA you will see less visual difference dropping that slightly than you would from say going from High to Medium detail. Let me know the results, by the way what system/Graphics card do you have?

it sounds as though you are saying that you have a top notch card, is the remainder of your system able to keep up with it?
Cheers

L


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## SeeK (Mar 29, 2006)

I'm not sure, actually. This is my system:

AMD Athlon64 3700+ @ 2.9 Ghz
Corsair TWINX2048-3200C2 @ 207 Mhz (DDR400), 2-3-2-7-1T
Connect3D Radeon X1900XT
ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe X16
Tagan 580W 2Force-series

As you can see, my CPU is now faster than a FX-57. Should be enough to keep it from bottlenecking the graphics card. But then again, I'm running the XT at 690/800, which is CCC max clock. I tried clocking in ATI Tool, but it barely knows what card I have. It thinks the normal clocks are 500/600 and I get artifacts without it noticing.

And I'm not using AA at all, actually. All the fancy settings in Catalyst are disabled, exceot for High-Quality AF. And HDR really shouldn't draw that much power from a card like this.


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## Tatty_One (Mar 30, 2006)

You should be walking it with that system and graphics card!  Think the problem is more deep routed than detail and AA for sure.  You can see my system specs, I can walk any game in full detail with max AA, well any game I have got, BF2, COD2, HL2 etc etc so yours should walk it.

May I suggest you download 3D Mark 05 from futuremark if you have not got it already just bang "futuremark" in a search engine, install it and then run the benchmark test, let me know your score, sounds to me like you may have a driver issue but if thats the case the performance against 3D Mark would refelct that, you should be hitting 10,000 odd in that.

One other thing, a mistake I made with my overclock that would only effect the test a little but would effect your CPU performance more is make sure you have "AMD Cool N Quiet" disabled, you should be able to do that in BIOS, its not recommended to have it enabled with a decent overclock, let me know how you get on, bottom line is you have a system there that graphically is performing worse than mine and you should be thrashing me!


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## SeeK (Mar 31, 2006)

Odd. I'm really starting to think I should RMA my graphics card. I really did expect better performance from a card like this. And CnQ is disabled. Although, I have clocked everything down now, since the computer started rebooting while playing games randomly. 

The error report says it's because the graphics card stopped responding to driver commands and was set in an endless loop. Another reason for RMA? I did have the card clocked to 690/800 the first time it happened, but overclocking doesn't usually cause error like that, does it?

EDIT: I get 17 FPS in Imperial City in Oblivion. That's on top settings. A friend of mine's got at 7800GTX and he says it flows perfectly on the same settings.


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## trog100 (Mar 31, 2006)

u quote the typical symptoms of overclocking too much.. he he

at what resolutions do all these comparisons occur.. the resolution does play a big part in frame  rates.. 

if u download 3dmark 2005 and give a default score in that it would be possible to tell at a glance if your card was going as it should be.. why not try it..??

also how much system memory do u have..??

i really know bugger all about the system requirements of oblivion.. but 2 gigs of system memory is needed for games like fear and quake 4 to play at the highest settings.. 

trog


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## Mercenary4 (Mar 31, 2006)

Oy vae, and my brother just bought a ??9600?? to power Oblivion! If you are having problems, just imagine his dissapointment Hopefully for him, not you, your card is just defective.


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## SeeK (Apr 1, 2006)

Yeah...

The thing is, I get a quite normal score in 05. 11719. And the guy I compared with was using 1280x1024, just like me.


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