Patch Allows Old PCs to Play Oblivion (News)

Vicious Sid, GamePro

02/05/2006 11:33:29

The good news: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is one of the most visually fantastic games ever made, a feast for the senses. You can't wait to play it!

The bad news: You're stuck with a prehistoric gaming PC, packing a Geforce 3 with 64 MB of video RAM, a 1.6 Ghz CPU, and 512 MB of system RAM, which falls well below Oblivion's minimum hardware sprcs.

What to do?

Answer: download OLDblivion, a community-created modification that simplifies the game's most visually demanding graphical effects. With the modification, Oblivion can still look plenty beautiful, but more importantly, Oblivion will be smooth and playable on out-of-date hardware, especially if you take time to fine-tune the options.

In a nutshell, OLDblivion adds support for pre-Direct X 9 graphics chipsets (Oblivion makes heavy use of Direct X 9 shaders and effects), adding new support for pixel shader 1.1 and vertex shader 1.1.

OLDblivion adds support for the following graphics cards:

Geforce 3 series Geforce 4 series Geforce FX 5200 series Geforce PCX 5300 Geforce FX 5500 Geforce FX 5700 series Radeon 9550 Radeon 9200 series Radeon 9000 series Radeon 8500 series

The current version of OLDblivion still has a few bugs that will impact certain graphics chipsets, but most of these shouldn't impact your enjoyment.

If you're looking for other ways to tweak your Oblivion experience, don't miss 5 Ways to Make Oblivion Run Smoother for life-saving tips.