Hello,

I am trying to run Oblivion GOTY on a Toshiba Satellite A665-S6089 laptop with an Intel i-5 processor, 4 GB of memory, running under Windows 7 Home Premium x64, and with a discrete Nvidia GeForce 310 M videocard. I have DirectX 11 installed on the computer, but the card is said to support only up to 10.1.

The problem I have - the game does not seem to detect the video card. From the 'Options' option of the start menu, only the Intel card is listed, and that, I believe, is the integrated graphics. Also, the auto-detect sets the video quality to medium, and if I change it manually to high, during character creation I get a black screen, although the menus and the sounds are still there. I do specifically assign this game to be run with the video card from the Nvidia control panel, but no change.

Judging by some other posts I have seen here, other people seem to have had similar problems - any suggestions/ideas?

Thanks.

The reason it doesn't detect your card is because it was released after the game.

Just change the settings yourself, that is not a powerful enough card for high though.

Hello, and thanks for the post.

Which settings exactly would I need to change, and from where?

Also, I think the video card requirements were 6000 or better, I would think this card should fall into the "better" category?

Thanks again.

The 310 is a low level 'business' video solution, not really intended for gaming...... it 'works', for certain values thereof. Don't expect stellar performance from it though.

Fire up the Oblivion Launcher that gets installed to your drive, (not the autorun guy on the disk...) and just click on the button for medium settings. Set the resolution you want as well. Then, when you get in-game, adjust the sliders so you get the best compromise between performance, and pretty, that you can deal with.

The listing for the video requirements are for standalone units. Mobile cards have different standards and aren't officially supported. While some may work, most won't. And those that do will generally work poorly.

I wouldn't be so quick to say that mobile cards work poorly. There are plenty of people with notebooks that have a gaming caliber video card that are maxing this game out. The support may not be officially there, but it works fine most of time provided there's enough horsepower behind the card/chip and the drivers are up to date.

You'll notice I mentioned "generally". That typically means that there are exceptions to a comment made. I even mentioned "most" in the sentence before, so I'm not quite sure why you think I was saying that all mobile cards svck. While you can special order a gaming quality card, the ones that are already built in by the manufacturer are usually too weak to run games well. Again, notice the "usually", just to avoid any future confusion.

Well - I was just thinking that since the game is about - what - 5 or 6 years old now, any card that is sold currently should be able to handle it at least decently... (see my second post above).

That would be true of stand alone cards for desktop systems, but not for laptop graphics. That's one of the first things that manufacturers cut corners on in order to conserve battery life and reduce heat build up. For many people, their laptop is little more than a portable web browser, so they're built accordingly.