Not sure in which subforum I should post this, offtopic or technical or mods ... its a bit of everything.

Anyway, I have bought a new gaming computer and I'm trying to get the best looking game available.

Unfortunately I only play roleplaying games - the more hardcoe, the better, action rpgs arent that exciting - so my only choice for really good looks seems to be Oblivion.

Ok, any maybe Dragon Age, but I think Oblivion has better potential for greatest looks.

So what mods do you think would result in the highest hardware "stress" and best looks ?

Or would you rather advise some other RPG for best possible graphics from a RPG ?

You might want to post this in (or have it moved to) the Oblivion Mods forum.

Anyway, Oblivion is a good choice, if you really want to go for ridiculously OTT graphics. It doesn't matter how good your PC is, there are mods, or combinations of mods, that will break it, with ease. Trust me on this one...

But yeah, there are tons of choices. It's very much a matter of taste; also... how good is your PC, anyhow? Specs!

Read this (all of it) and associated links: http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_1.html

Eh. There's some amount of pointless and/or dodgy stuff there (e.g., some of the ini tweaks). Not to say it all is, btw! But yeah.

If you want links, I guess http://tesivpositive.animolious.com/ is a good bet, in general. For graphics in particular, there's not much, except for http://devnull.sweetdanger.net/obliviontextureoverhaul.html, but that's rather out of date. Still useful, when used with care (as is often the case, with mods, mod sites, and so forth).

Re: Dragon Age, forget it. :/ Graphics-wise, it's... old school, to put it nicely.

TweakGuides is good for understanding what's going on, both in Oblivion and on your machine. It's impossible to tell someone how to do their settings as it differs depending on your system and your preferences. You obviously shouldn't take everything you read there and just apply it, but that goes for everything you've ever read.

Get an understanding for what's going on, clarify what it is you want to achieve, and pick the tweaks that sounds like they may help you. Try them out and if you don't like them do something else. Trial and failure ftw.

I only started this 3 weeks ago and it took me two weeks to get my graphics to where I wanted them to be. I knew nothing about any of this before Oblivion, but thanks to TweakGuides my game is now awesome. :thumbsup:

Thanks for all posts ! :goodjob:

Well Hardware is:
- Intel Core i5 540M (2,53 GHz, 3 MB Cache)
- 2x2GB Dual-Channel DDR3 SDRAM (1.333 MHz)
- ATI RADEON 5870 HD-Graphics card (1 GB)
- 256 GB SSD
- 1920x1200 Display
- Windows Premium Home

Its an Alienware m17x:
http://www.alienware.com/Landings/promotions.aspx?~ck=mn

Hm. Apparently, that's more like a "real" (i.e., desktop) HD5770. So, you might want to keep that in mind.

The rest of the system should translate to "real" (see above) specs fairly evenly though, I imagine. So, that's good! an i5 is always nice, and hey, nothing wrong with an HD5770 either - but it's nowhere near the top of the line, basically.

On vanilla oblivion ( The big O + SI + dlc) with no extensive graphics mods you'll run perfectly on the highest settings.

Ooooooh ok.

I figured since its an Alienware it must have some super highend graphics.

I can already run vanilla Oblivion very fine on my old computer (well I usually disable grass because yeah it looks good but opponents usually drop their weapons into it and then good luck finding them), I only got the Alienware because its so super crazy cool looking + I wanted a notebook since years, but could never manage to decide.

Havent bothered following the hardware development of computers though. Since they stopped naming their cpus and gpus according to any reasonable scheme, it went kinda complicated.