Oblivion podcasts and spore

If you haven't heard about Will Wright's upcoming game spore you should take a look at this video at gaming steve. He also has a 2 podcasts where he describes what happened when he got to play elder scrolls oblivion for 6 hours on both the pc and the Xbox360. Part 1 and Part 2

He also talks about other gaming and hardware news and he reviews a few games. Both podcasts are about 2 hours long and are about 35 Mb each.

And last but not least, he also has an entire 2 hours long interview with Pete Hines where they talk about oblivion :D The interview

Nvidia 7600GT seems like a really nice card actually. In one review where they compared a 6800GT to the 7600GT I found this.

Battlefield 2

7600 GT

6800 GT

1024 x 768

86.04 fps

52.41 fps

1600 x 1200

49.83 fps

32.02 fps

2048 x 1536

34.51 fps

16.95 fps

During other games though, the difference is smaller, usually the 7600GT is around 20-30% faster.

Oblivion forest

Now this is what forests should looke like in games :D

Oblivion and graphics cards

Great quote from gamingsteve's podcast preview of oblivion

"Another funny situation occurred as he finally made his escape out of the cavern. As he walked out into the sunlight, he noticed a fight taking place right at the dungeon entrance. Apparently, an Imperial guard had been chasing a thief through the woods, and it had inevitably come to blows. Poor GamingSteve ( dense as he is ), didn't know who to help.. or even if he should interfere with "official empire business." After much deliberation, he pulled out his sword and attacked the guard, who looked at him like he was crazy and screamed, "NOT ME, YOU IDIOT! ATTACK HIM!!" So, they chased off after the thief, who raced to the top of a hill, throwing down insults at both the guard and GamingSteve. Eventually, they caught up to him and ran him through with their swords... and the Imperial guard was gracious enough to let Steve loot the bandit and keep all the goodies.

He emphasized that none of this was pre-scripted... it was all due to the incredible radiant AI."

If the artificial intelligence of the games caracters really is that good, it would be entirely possible to mistake the caracters for real humans :D


Nvidia will apparently launch it's new generation of graphics cards during computex tomorrow. The new cards will be 7900GT and 7900GTX and a replacement for the popular 6600GT that will obviously be called 7600GT. There will also be a 7600GS with less pipelines than the GT model. These cards are apparently just a dieshrink of the 7800 series, so only higher clockspeeds and less powerusage.

So no earth shattering speed increase. Both the 7900 models have 24 pipelines, the GT runs on 450 Mhz it's MSRP seems to be $299. Seems like it will have lots of speed for a resonable amount of money.


The 7600GT only has 12 pipelines and only 128 bit memory access and it's MSRP is apparently going to be $199. So x2 the performance for 1.5 times the money. ATI is going to lower it's prices when nvidia launch their new cards. So the next few months will be interesting for gamers that want/need to update their graphics card to play oblivion.


Oh right, and then there's the new unreal, crysis from crytech and lots of games based on the doom 3 engine.

So what card it the right one to get... whichever runs oblivion the best of course!! within a resonable price range.

Then there's also the question of which card will be best for the future. ATI or Nvidia, the one with shade model 3.0 done right or the one with shader model not done right from the beginning but that's apparently being done more correct with each driver updates until it will probably be shader model 3.0 done right...? Nvidia has slowly been increasing it's dynamic branching performance with driver updates. From the beginning they lost performance (~10%) when using dynamic branching compared to not, but now they seem to get about a ~30% increase from it.

Windows vista is lurking right around the corner looking fast, great and slim yeah right! maybe people that upgrade now will have to upgrade again for vista and then upgrade yet again just to be able to play a games on vista...

I feel love in the air, the love to hate microsoft. Feels like it's time to pull out one of those "what if microsoft was making cars analogies" therefore I shall end this post.

So there!

Elder scrolls Oblivion

Elder scrolls oblivion has finally gone gold and the launch date is march 20 and availability will be the next day for the us and apparently a few days later for europe. The last time I was excited about it was probably in november when I expected to get it within a few weeks but that didn't happen...

Now I'm getting excited over it again and go to their homepage several times each day just hoping to findd some new information. Everything about the game just seems to amazing. 50 hours of speech in the game and great graphics. an AI system called radiant AI that is goal driven and makes the people in the game come alive instead of basically just being personlike informationposts that fight back if you hit them like it was in morrowind.

Instead of telling a person to walk over to the table in the tavern and get food at 12 pm they just have to "tell" the person to find food whatever way they can when they are hungry. They go buy food if the have money or steal it if they have low responsibility. The value of the game will be great too considering how long it will take to beat it. Just completing the mainquest will take something like 25-30 hours. To do everything in the game, probably something like hundreds of hours O_O

Considering a normal game takes about 20 hours to beat, that works out to having to pay about 2.5 euros for each hour of gameplay. With oblivion that becomes 0.5 euros/hour if we "only" played for 100 hours.

Recommended system specs for oblivion to run properly is 3 Ghz intel or equivalent amd cpu and ati x800 or nvidia 6800. I have an amd athlon64 socket 939 3000+ right now so that will work fine but if I need to I can overclock that one to 2.6 Ghz instead of the normal 1.8 Ghz. So cpu wise I'm sooo ready for the game, my graphics card is only a nvidia 6600gt so that will have to be upgraded.

Elder scrolls homepage

First posting

Just created this blog and this is my first entry which should be obvious :P