Figured I'd get this out of the way instead of constantly wondering. Got two GTX 365's, tried to get HDR and AA working together - through the ini and through the control panel by forcing - no luck. What I don't get is that surely the graphics card has the correct shaders to do such a thing? I mean it works on FO3 perfectly fine, so what's going on with Oblivion? Two different games I know, but I've read that's possible to get such a thing in Oblivion, and it obviously is. Is there something specific I need to do? Or is it just down to my graphics card not being recognized and I should come to understand I won't get AA and HDR working at all?

nVIDIA has some weird laptop cards out that really confuse many games, but since there has been no official announcement of any such card as a "GTX 365" for either the desktop or laptop, you need to be more accurate here.

Gah I meant to type 465s, I even intended to but I've always kept typing 365s for some odd reason.

I have an older GTX 260-216 and she also does not work with HDR and AA forced via Nvidia drivers. The AA is just not working. I switched to Bloom lighting and in-game 4x AA and quite frankly, I think the loss compared to HDR is really not all that much. Certainly Bloom + 4x AA looks MUCH, MUCH better than HDR + No-AA. Give it a try and play a bit with it, you may come to the same conclusion.

The ATI 3870 I had previously could do HDR + AA together, but not the Nvidia. But the ATI had worse texture filtering. It always shimmered and flickered a bit, and that annoyed me much more than whether I could run HDR + AA on the ATI card.

Hmm I'll have a go and see what I prefer. I had bloom & AA on before, but when I switched to HDR I saw such a noticeable difference :cryvaultboy:

Hmm...I played Oblivion on a GTX260-216 for some time and the combination of HDR and nVidia-Control-Panel forced AA seemed to work fine for me. It's certainly possible that what I saw was pure placebo... it seemed less jaggy only because I assumed it was. But if in reality AA was not functioning, then AA is not very important to me, since I was quite happy with the results. AF is another matter. The GTX260 and of course my GTX470 run AF at x16 without breaking a sweat. I find it makes a very dramatic improvement.

-Decrepit-

@Decrepit
I was suffering from the Nvidia AA placebo effect for a long time myself. Until I stood there in front of people and their arms and head edges were just so edgy that I thought this was too much of "placebo" now and I checked out Bloom and in-game AA... Meanwhile Nvidia AF set to 16 and "Quality" (in any case best setting) is definitely making a huge difference, I totally agree with you.

Just asking: on your new GTX470, does AA work with enforcement via Nvidia control panel? Or is it still placebo? What OS you have and what Nvidia driver version? Would be good to know for when I make the next upgrade. Thanks a lot!

@DoubleD
I admit HDR is generally the nicer lighting, it can look very juicy and dramatic. One could argue it does too much so at times. I already had it tuned down in the Oblivion.ini file because I found it was too blasting and glaring sometimes. Obviously it is a matter of personal preference.

To be honest, Oblivion AA seems about the same to me on both cards. (I have it enabled at only x2 to help with FPS.) But as mentioned, I just don't notice overly objectionable jaggies while playing. They are not totally absent by any means (and I doubt they would be at x2), but are subtle enough to be ignored. I'm gonna provide a few screen-shot links so you can see what my game looks like with both the 260 and 470. Be aware that ALL my images get at least a little post-capture manipulation in Paint.NET. If nothing else, they are cropped to dramatic presentation and reduced in size for best display on smaller monitors. I sometimes adjust color levels and often apply a SHARPEN filter (which, if anything, will make an image seem a little more jaggy than it originally was). I'll try and provided only those with little processing for a more accurate evaluation.

These were originally captured at 1280x1024. I use the highest in-game graphic settings, with sliders at or near their right-side limits. HDR enabled in-game. AA x2 via nVidia Control Panel. AF x16 via nVidial Control Panel. nVidia driver version 258.96 for the GTX470, a slightly older version for the GTX260-216. Windows7-64-bit for the 470. Vista 64-bit for the 260-216.

BAH! PhotoBucket is down for maintenance, so no captures just yet. I'll add them when the site becomes reachable.

Well poot! PhotoBucket is now reachable, but there have been changes. At the moment, copying direct photo links apparently doesn't do anything. When I go to fill in the Insert Link window here, PASTE is grayed out.

Photobucket remains Borked for me. In the interim, http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1114736-thoughts-on-my-second-play-through/page__p__16445805__hl__Decrepit__fromsearch__1&#entry16445805. These will have all been made with the GTX470, but as mentioned jagginess seems about the same to me with either card. Some of these images will have seen moderately heavy post-capture manipulation, but those should be easily spotted. In any case there are enough images here for you to get a general idea of what I see while playing the game.


As to 260 vs 470, I'll give the upgrade a qualified high endorsemant. I didn't just upgrade my GPU, but rebuilt almost the entire computer including CPU. My old system was the 260-216 along with an Intel i8500 3.16ghz CPU and 4gb DDR2 ram. My current one (Oblivion wise) is the 470 along with an Intel i7 930 2.8ghz CPU and 6gb ram. (Oblivion.exe is flagged LAA for both builds). I'm not sure how the CPU comes into play here. The i7 930 is newer technology with a large cache, but slower ghz than my i8500, and Oblivion LOVES ghz.

All that said, I find my new set up is an overall marked improvement. Before, I got major lag/stutters and more-frequent crashes when attempting to use RAEVWD and other eye-candy add-ons. Not so now! I run just about all of RAEVWD except the inside-city modules with only the mildest of lag. Even areas like the IC waterfront, Elsweyr-Anequina (where I ran RAEVWD even with my older set-up), and the general Weye/Verona are (quite heavily modded) are far more tolerable now. On a negative note, I sometimes think combat is a tad bit more sluggish on the new build, and wonder if this is a result of lesser CPU ghz. The difference is subtle, and not enough to cause concern. I can't see it being tied to the 470.

-Decrepit-

Hmm, wondering how comes you can run HDR and AA at the same time, a shame :sadvaultboy:
I went back to bloom and nice AA, and I noticed I missed having the nice soft edges, lol.

DoubleD, I know it's somethat off-topic but if you want to beef up the visuals of the game other than lighting and AA/AF there are many, many options for better textures for just about anything in the game, and mod installation is not that difficult (obviously depending on how deep you want to get into it). Just saying.