I can't tell for sure, but it looks like maybe they have dynamic shadows working in some scenes?

Either way now I'm curious if shadeMe has made any progress since the OBGEv3 release.

Let me bounce a question off you guys. I have a GTX240 and it handles everything pretty well but when I try to force AA with it I end up with nothing but a black screen regardless of what shaders or effects I'm using. Suggestions anyone?

Incidentally the Coloreffects.fx bleaches the game of color regarless of what else I'm running with it as well.

Morrowind wasn't a console port, though.

No, they're just using the normal OBGE.

And as per the shadows, here's a quote from the PM conversation I had with Vikart around when the trailer was released:

I searched the thread and didn't find anything, but the Celshaded setting doesn't seem to work at all. All of the other ones work perfectly fine except for this one, am I missing something here?

That's a Direct3D shortcoming as far as I'm aware. You're SoL for MSAA, but might I take the time to suggest an FXAA or MLAA shader?

Not sure what you mean by SoL. I'm actually forcing Supersampling but none too sure what it's doing if anything.

Know of anything that might remedy the problem or at least lessen or reduce the horrible, horrible look of life without AA?

There are like four different AA shaders that come with OBGE, I use MLAA which is the least blurry but also doesn't completely eliminate aliasing.

SoL means "[censored] out of luck"

You can fix the coloreffects issue by changing the "define"s for those three values at the beginning of the shader to "undef"s

Yes. I was using MDLAA but honestly I saw only a tiny difference in quality.

You've lost me again with your talking of changing things. My problem is that Coloreffects does as advertise only there's just nothing but tan and brown when I adjust it. Where would I enact such changes exactly? Do you mean the support tool? I'm not sure how to manually edit the shader files.

He's working on it. Or so I'm told.

I played with this mod a bunch tonight for the first time. The results were visually impressive, but I was disappointed by performance. I found it playable with volumetric SSAO, water, and MLAA, but only barely. Adding any fancier stuff like DoF or PCS LightShafts was too slow. I have an i7-920 @ 3.2 GHz and a GTX 580, so I was kinda hoping to get more eye candy. It's possible it's my fault -- I'm actually pretty new to Oblivion modding, so I might need to make some changes to my oblivion.ini or something. I'm just using the highest preset from the launcher options.

Regardless, I am impressed with what you've done with this mod. Very cool technical hackery. I'll probably stick with SSAO and water if nothing else because they add the most to the game's look.

Er, you should be noticing significant antialiasing with MDLAA, with blurriness. Only FXAA (I think) and MLAA would provide results that might result in a "tiny difference" in my opinion.

For coloreffects, just open up the .fx file in notepad. You should see the values I'm talking about. That's the way you're going to want to edit any of the shaders' values, since the support plugin doesn't really work at the moment and you have to use the shaderlist.

By "he" do you mean Ethatron or one of the Andoran guys? It seems as if Ethatron's working on like everything right now, I'm pretty sure he's also the Secretary General of the U.N. or something.

By "he", I meant shadeMe. The Andoran guys are using the ol' creature-statics trick in their mod. Dunno about Ethatron - He's probably in damage-control mode now.

Oh, haha, okay. That's awesome news to me at least, compared to the pre-OBGEv3 status, even if it's a "or so I'm told" kind of progress. Also I kind of think you should refer to yourself in the third person all the time

Also I should ask Ethatron how difficult the process is converting normals to POM-friendly versions, it might be something I'm capable of doing somewhat competently

MLAA and volumetric SSAO are heavy shaders. I recommend cutting out SSAO entirely unless you really notice the difference with and without it.

Yeah here I am wondering about shadows when I'm running volumetric SSAO, MLAA, and that new godrays shader. I'm really begging for a slideshow I guess. It could be worse I suppose, I could be using any of the other SSAO shaders

I would rather give up MLAA than SSAO. I can barely see a difference with the AA shaders (maybe because I play at 1920x1200), but ambient occlusion makes a noticeable difference in lighting quality. I would be interested to see INIs and shaderlists that people use to play. I saw the link to user suggestions in the first post, but they seemed to all be options for individual shaders, not "here's what I use" type of lists. Thanks for the advice!

Hmmm... I just borrowed my friends 6990 to see if I want to upgrade to it, and a lot of games tripled their framerate from 45fps (crysis 2 and the witcher 2), to about 90-100fps @ 2560x1440 (edited after I read my own post, these framerates are only doubled, but some other games are trippled). I then ran oblivion @ crossfire renamed exe, and it gave me a 2-4% improvment (47 fps instead of 45, with ssao + godrays + liquid water only enabled) , each gpu using 60-80%. I then switched to my concurrent vanilla install, and still got 80-100fps. Which is the usual fps for my 5870. At best i gained a few stray frames.

Seriously unimpressive crossfire support right there. And that's regardless of memory onboard the card, the 6990 has 4gb (2gb effective), and I interestingly get the SAME fps hits when I install 4k lod textures and then RAEVWD (it uses at 1.2gb video memory usage via ati tray tools monitor, which should mean that it runs better on the 6990 vs the 1gb 5870, not so) . Obge has the same fps hits when i activate it. And it levels at exactly the same fps as my older, slower 5870 got. And this is on a 25 mod install. Without all the (apparently) cpu taxing mods such at better cities, fcom, and unique landscapes.

WIth them installed, I then get exactly the same fps hits (or at least, very close) as the 1gb 5870 with each inclusion.

Conclusion? = Well... video memory/crossfire/better card seems to play less of a role than i thought it would, I knew that oblivion had an invisible barrier linked to more mods, but I just assumed it either taxed the cpu, the memory, the hard drive, or the gpu, or gpu memory. Right now I have raided 60gb ssd's, 5ghz clock cpu, 8gb of memory, and a 6990. And it still maintains the same barrier. Of note, underclocking my cpu back to core clocks (2.8ghz), lowers the framerate by 8fps on my 100mod install, and by 20ish fps on my 15mod install.

This post is targeted at anyone purchasing a 6990 or gtx 590 with a large reason being a modded oblivion install. I am still going to get one of these cards once I can afford it, because I like games in general.

One thing worth mentioning, is that oblivion does however run completely stutter free on SSD hard drives and a fast cpu with oblivion stutter remover. Just the actual framerate barely improves with far greater cards.

I tried this with three revisions of the drivers, and confirmed that crossfire was in effect, maybe not being used correctly, but in effect regardless.

I didnt see anything about you testing a 590 in there and your performance results could be tied to any number of things (drivers, xfire support, ini settings, etc)

Sounds like 6990 at least in your experience does not set Oblivion on fire, though I'm envious as I get half your "bad" fps with none of that RAEVWD/retexture goodness you got going on there.

You are completely right, actually, I just assumed it would be similar. But it could scale FAR better. I withdraw that.

I also have further testing to do, since most of this is only from having it for a single day so far.

40 fps is beyond perfect and 20 fps is more than playable!

tweak tweak

All I use are the aforementioned MLAA, volumetric SSAO, godrays, and coloreffects with a 0.2 saturation boost, resulting in: |http://img843.imageshack.us/img843/5990/72707708.jpg |http://img828.imageshack.us/img828/3838/44960905.jpg |http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/4263/92844416.jpg |http://img845.imageshack.us/img845/6489/89023916.jpg |http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/1455/59347539.jpg |http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/5267/54463591.jpg |http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/6681/90341623.jpg |http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/7562/62230674.jpg |http://img854.imageshack.us/img854/1789/51271086.jpg |http://img32.imageshack.us/img32/2231/79650193.jpg|

But I like color. And nearly all of those are pre-v3 so it can only look better I guess

I still have no idea what I did to break it but MLAA decided to quit working. I thought at first it was the new godrays shader, but I've since tried it with just MLAA loaded, and zilch. It worked before though and I can't for the life of me get why it would just stop working. Unfortunately FXAA and the two DLAA ones do nothing for me other than blur the screen. The jaggies are highly annoying too

Would there be any possibility at all of being able to do the anti-aliasing directly through the OBGEv3 file itself? Or is that just asking for the same kind of heartbreak as trying to force the driver to act on it?

After all the complaining and little bugs concerning obge I have to say the team working on this is doing a marvelous job. It's quite amazing that a 5 year old game can produce a pretty picture like http://img825.imageshack.us/img825/8451/screenshot14d.png.

If you got an NVIDIA card you can force AA through NVIDIA Inspector as far as I know, in accordance to these instructions: http://www.scharesoft.de/joomla/forum/showpost.php?p=821302&postcount=412

I made comparison screenshots of all the AA-shaders. FXAA is had the best performance and "kill-jaggies" results. It's awesome I think