Video card not good enough?

Hey everyone!, I just received my new card, an ati radeon x1950 pro sapphire 512mb... And im playing oblivion. Well when im just exploring around the map, in the distance all the terrain (the mountains and stuff) is just kinda blurry with all the green mixed together and so forth. You can't see all the details from a distance. And you can especially notice when you ride your horse that all the bushes and stuff appear in front of you not too far. Why is it doing this? Lack of power from processor unit? Not a good enough video card? Not a good enough mother board? Can someone help?

 

Your card is definitely good enough to run Oblivion. That's not a problem. What settings are you running the game on? Sounds like you just have the video quality turned down...

 

well... i have it on application settings... but i only have one processor unit amd athlon 64 3000, 2.2 gightz and one gig ram.

 

And i did turn all the settings way up on the card and it's still not loading everything up as far as from a distance.... everything up close looks great, but from a distance it's just a blur... which kind of isn't making me too happy:cry haha

 

Your card is more than "good enough". What you're experiencing is related to the quality of the textures used at various distances. Vanilla Oblivion uses 1024x1024 LOD2 textures. Those are the textures used at the horizon or at infinity. This was a design decision made to accomodate the game-consoles. To get rid of the blur, you will need the LOD2 textures of at least 2048x2048 which helps greatly. This is 4x the resolution of the original and doesn't bog down your framerate. To really enjoy the distance as an almost "real life" experience there are 4096x4096 LOD2 textures available. This is 16x the resolution of the original and will choke almost all but the video-god-cards.
The objects appearing "before your very eyes" is also a game-console accomodation. Game consoles have a fixed amount of ram, so no matter how good your "rig" is, you have to play by console rules. Usually PC games will preload vast amounts of data "just in case", and the more ram you have, the larger the prefetch cache. But that's for PC games. Oblivion is a console game, and has been hobbled to be only as good as the consoles it was designed to play on. However, Bethesda Softworks provided a user editable Oblivion.ini file that contains a much higher degree of tweaking than the console-dumb "good, better, best" choices. For example, the fLightLOD2 variable controls the game distance that lights are viewable at night. The default is about 10000 units,( perceptively about 100 meters) but this isn't in the least realistic. On a clear night, one should be able to see a lit torch for many hundreds of meters. I've set that variable at 50000 units and it's a more pleasing result.
A good place to start: The Elder Scrolls Source

 

Do you have the latest ati catalyst drivers the're now at 7.7.