Hey there. I was considering getting Oblivion but after getting Fo3 and NV just to have them CTD all the time, I'm a little skeptical. I have the Intel HD graphics integrated GPU. Are there CTD problems with this "card" or will I actually be able to play it?

Specifications:

Intel pentium P6100 @ 2.0 GHz
Intel HD Graphics, 300 mb / VRAM
4 GB RAM

Things that I simply don't give a rat's ass about in games (graphics wise)

-Water
-Shadows
-Shaders
-Blood decals
-Resolution, I often play in 800x600

Things I DO give a rat's ass about:

-Animations
-Sound quality
-Textures don't look like someone threw up on a screen and called it proper texturing.

Can I at least run the game?

CTD issues are usually script and programming problems, not graphics. A poor video system will make the frame rate slow, and the image grainy and jagged, but it doesn't usually make it crash. However, buggy drivers for video cards can cause crashes at random, even when the performance is good.

(REAL SPOILER) Actually, 2/3 or 3/4 through the tutorial, when the game is going to switch from small underground textures to enter the sewers, Intel's chips did in fact immediately cause a CTD without any error message. As time passed, and Intel chips finally began to be more complete, adding functions that cards had already included ten years previously, the CTD moved from the manhole to the Grating leading from the sewer out of doors to the island's surface.

I don't think you're going to get any optimistic recommendations for trying Oblivion on this system. Your CTDs with those other games may be heat-related (you're pushing the system pretty hard to run them), and those two games are better optimized than Oblivion is.

I haven't referenced the site in a couple of years, but there was once a web site devoted to helping owners of terrible hardware to find work-arounds and play anyway. The very latest, Sandy Bridge, video solutions (and whatever was riding in the package with the i3s / i5s) finally had everything that a Dx9 card had back in 2005, when Oblivion was finalized (Radeon 9800 XTs for development). That means if the drivers were only decent, the latest Intel hardware is equal to various below-minimum cards people did use at the time, such as Geforce 6600 Vanilla, all of the FXes, and Radeon X1300 Pro, 9600 Pro, etc.

I can't even remember the name of the site, if it still exists, but there once were literally two printed pages worth of comments about an assortment of "performance enhancing" Mods for Oblivion. If the Old Blivion web site is still up, and there are still folks hanging around their user forums, someone there may know of this performance improvements collection.

Surprise, surprise! I had a bookmark, still in FireFox, and it worked. The collector's Handle is Ball of Fire, and here is his link:

Oops, wrong one?

http://sites.google.com/site/ballofflame/theoblivionperformanceproject