Rennn

You can use a free program like MotionJoy to use a PS3 controller with Dark Souls. Make your PS3 controller emulate a 360 controller, and you're set. Also, make sure to get this mod: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=488240 It uncaps the resolution and backs up your saves automatically so that GFWL can't lose them, among other small fixes. All that's left to fix now is the sometimes temperamental optimization: 99% of the time the game is optimized quite well and is easy to run, but fur and certain particle effects stress weaker cards more than expected.

To improve graphics with little or no fps loss, try using just the ENB Color Effect of OBGE, and/or Lush and Gaudy Water. I use both on my Acer Aspire notebook, lol. It has no real video card and a 1.00Ghz cpu, but I can still use those graphical mods without noticeable fps loss. Another option is Alluring Potion Bottles. It makes bottles look great, and since they're just bottles there isn't a noticeable performance hit. This graphical mod is another relatively low-impact, high performance favorite: http://oblivion.nexusmods.com/mods/38204

I'm glad you got it working, it's not cool when a great game becomes really unstable.

I'd be very unenthusiastic about playing without these two mods: http://oblivion.nexusmods.com/mods/23419 http://oblivion.nexusmods.com/mods/7819 Btw, the climbing one says it's a beta, but I've never had any bugs with it. It's great with Open Cities, but it also helps to reach high areas in Ayleid ruins (it's great for grabbing those pesky welkynd stones that are out of reach), and it can be used to climb trees and buildings if there's a reason.

There are a lot of good cards to choose from for relatively low prices now.

Just a heads-up to anyone who's unaware, Durante's resolution uncapper mod now includes the ability to automatically back up your saves so GFWL can't lose them, and it also makes it so that your mouse cursor can be hidden.

The pc edition jumped from a user score of 6.9 to 3.6 on Metacritic in less than a day. This is highly suspicious, considering that it was incrementing by margins of one or two tenths of a point before this, and was just about to hit 7. I'm not going to go so far as to claim with certainty that an admin on Metacritic decided to go on a crusade, but that's one hell of a big jump, and virtually all of the new bad ratings are without written reviews. Also, tell me if these guys are multies? -_- Score: 2 Worst port ever. Resolution is capped, FPS are capped, keyboard and mouse controls are a nightmare, video options are inexistant ... in general it make me feel like I'm playing on a PS2 emulator. Score: 2 Bad port. No bindings for mouse, bugs and graphics flickers. From console developers to console boys. Resolution is capped, FPS are capped, keyboard and mouse controls are a nightmare, video options are inexistant ... I think is damn timemachine from Skyrim to dark 2005 ages Notice that his grammar and half his sentence is identical between postings. (Resolution is capped, FPS are capped) I HATE people like this. It really ****ing irritates me when people do things like this just because they think they're a special little butterfly who knows everything about anything.

A 560ti is a great deal, as is a 660 or a 660ti. 670s perform better, but the price jumps considerably ofc. I don't know about AMD cards; I'm not familiar with the architecture.

That's not very likely, considering neither Fallout 3 or NV were ported to the original Wii. There's no precedent, and there's virtually no margin for profit considering the Fallouts are edgy and Nintendo keeps making family/10+ consoles.

I recently got a notebook, but it's more like a cross between a netbook and a notebook. It has an HD 6290 with no dedicated vram, 2GB of ram, and a 1.00Ghz dual core cpu. I expected to get about ~3 fps in Oblivion on minimum settings, but with a few optimization mods it actually runs pretty well at low settings. I can keep distant terrain and some grass. In the wilderness my fps ranges from 25-35, in interiors it's 30+, and in towns it's 20-25. It's pretty playable and it doesn't look terrible on a 10" screen, so that's a nice surprise considering the notebook/netbook hybrid was only $300. Screens: http://oblivion.nexusmods.com/Images/122285

Cool story.

Nightwish ftw.

As for making mods not conflict, don't get two mods that edit the same thing. For example, if you get one mod that replaces the female body, don't get another mod that replaces the female body at the same time. If you get one mod that alters weapon damage, don't get another mod that alters weapon stats. If you get a mod that makes widespread changes to the levelled spawns in Oblivion, avoid other mods that add spawns and creatures. If you get certain mods, like Open Cities, it will conflict with almost any other mod that affects cities as well.

I wouldn't upgrade to 64 bit XP two years before support ends, then upgrade to Windows 7. That's kind of pointless. I haven't heard good things about Windows 8 either. It looks like a resource hog.

Windows 7 will take less RAM, but unless you go 64 bit you wouldn't see a difference in the RAM games are allowed to use anyway. Even then it would only help with certain games. If you were asking which to buy I'd say Windows 7 every time, but since you already have Vista it's probably not worth the ~$140 upgrade.

I doubt they'll release the 7XX next year, how would that even give the 6XX enough time to make a profit?

About that weird fps drop in seemingly barren areas (which I also get)... I think I found the issue a couple months ago. I was tweaking some vanilla ruins for a mod in an exterior cell. I grabbed one of the pillars Bethesda had stuck in the ground, moved it, and realized there was a whole ruin attached underground. There was no door, and no way in. There was just a whole ruin sitting below the ground because Bethesda wanted to show the pillars above ground. I looked around, and there were at least three of these undergound ruins in the area, all of which had only a couple pillars above ground. Bethesda cut polygons from the rocks and made them look like octagons, meanwhile some other guy on the dev team was busy sticking whole ruins of 20,000+ polygons underground because they were too lazy to simply cut off the pillars as a new object in a meshing program. You wouldn't even believe how many ferns are at least mostly below the ground. I'm spending hours at a time modding Skyrim's landscape, and so far nearly half the plants I've edited have been nearly submerged. I think they just spammed the "F" key to snap them to the ground without even manually editing most of their positions to be more appealing or more efficient.

I never said BF3 ran badly; Origin infected half the programs on my computer (and Windows 7) and ate them. I spent $60 on it, and I could only play it for a couple weeks. As for needing a $500 card for Dark Souls, that's simply not true. My 460 maxes it easily with no slowdown. It's your cpu you should worry about, with all the backround saving and loading. Even considering that you should have a 3Ghz+ cpu, it's much better optimized than Skyrim. Skyrim looks and runs like crap on ultra.

Just a quick tip: it looks like GFWL has been deleting a few Dark Souls saves. Back up your save(s). I'm going to give Dark Souls a pass. Here's my reasoning: Skyrim is a **** port. The UI started out broken, the graphics are bad, the performance is bad, they cut spellmaking, they removed shortswords etc. Skyrim gets a free pass because of the mods, why not Dark Souls? I don't know if anybody can say with a straight face that Skyrim got an 8.1 user score just based on the vanilla game with no mods considered. I mean, you had to aim your cursor up and to the left of the actual UI listing you wanted to select. And the font was made for 480p and 720p resolutions. The CK is still buggy as hell and released months late. The 360 even got Dawnguard first. Wtf? I don't direct this at anyone here, but I'm getting tired of hearing people talk about Skyrim like it's the best port in the world when it's really one of the worst. Dark Souls is even optimized way better than Skyrim. At 1080p on ultra with 8x AA and 16x AF for both games, Dark Souls easily beats Skyrim's lightly modded graphics and gives me higher framerates consistently. Mods save Skyrim and mods save Dark Souls, but hardly anyone is complaining like this about Skyrim. I only bring Skyrim up this heavily because I had really high hopes for it, and I still expect it to be an amazing game with a few dozen more mods and fixes added, but it's far more with mods than without and the reviews always take mods into account for ES games. People keep telling me not to buy these "shitty ports" like Dark Souls, but then what do we really have? Crysis from 2008? The Witcher 2 is so poorly optimized it's laughable (though by most accounts it's a great game, I'm just commenting on programming finesse). Diablo 3 looks like it's from 2002 and kicks you from your single player game for inactivity. Battefield 3 and ME3 ship with Origin. SWBF 3 has been cancelled, Tera is just a WoW clone, SWTOR flopped, Rift is an even bigger WoW clone. Darksiders 2 is one of the worst ports I've ever seen, with fewer graphical options and worse graphics than Dark Souls. Dead Island was pretty much exactly the 360 version with a direct port. Valve can't count to 3 in any of their series, which is really too bad because they make awesome, well optimized games. What new AAA games haven't been crippled yet by DRM or bad porting? It's a sad state of affairs when we have to depend on mods to fix almost all our games, but mostly, we do. Dark Souls isn't unique in that regard, though it has become the perfect scapegoat for all the port hate, considering half of Metacritic is on a crusade to create multies and give Dark Souls 0s with reckless abandon. Btw, I agree with many of Hoofhearted's points. I can safely say that Dark Souls is a **** port without saying it's anything but a great game. I already had spare gamepads, a pre-existing install of Motion Joy, and I was already planning on getting a 1080p mod prior to release. If you weren't into modding, or if you didn't already happen to own the peripherals I can easily see how the flaws are inexcusable for many people. I can see why people want to teach FROM not to make such awful ports, but it was their first attempt. Companies like Ubisoft install malware in their software, and AC3 is far from their first PC game. From did as much as they could (even throwing in rebindable keys at the last minute), considering Namco was shoving a deadline down their throat despite From's complete lack of experience in how PC games work. Consider again that this was made from a petition, which is amazing on its own. And would From really extend the Demon's Souls servers yet again if they weren't dedicated to their fans? EA takes some games offline after a month or two, by comparison. Demon's Souls is a niche hit and the servers are still up and fairly active, so what does that say about From? Dark Souls is a great game, and a bad port, but most PC games now are bad ports. If we're going to cut modded fixes from the reviews, we may as well give most of the the AAA titles 5/10 or lower on port quality alone. If we're going to cut all mods from our reviews and complain about DRM as if it's the devs fault instead of the publisher's, I'd better go back and rate the Killing Floor a 6 (thousands of modded maps ftw), Skyrim a 7, and BF3 a 1 (for almost destroying Windows 7 with Origin corruption). I'm going to go ahead and give Country Justice: Revenge of the Rednecks the hallowed score of absolute 0. (Trust me, it's far worse than the title sounds :facepalm: ) I can confirm, however, that Dark Soul's online has virtually no lag (maybe ~0.1 seconds?), which is a huge improvement over the ~1.5 seconds of lag when online on the PS3 version.

Wait... it doesn't look like that 7950 has a dvi-d port, unless the dvi-i port is also dvi-d? What connections does your monitor have Aegrus? Btw, that 7950 is 384-bit, so it should theoretically keep Skyrim stable at a ugrids of 11-ish, I saw someone else with a 384 bit card say that Skyrim was stable for them at a ugrids of 13. Edit: Omg Thor, you played Skyrim for 33 DAYS?? Almost 800 HOURS??? :woot:

He's talking about the dog named Dogmeat, not the meat you can find on dogs.

I'm working on making a real nude mod for the vanilla bodies. I got the meshes imported to Blender correctly, and I deleted the underwear ofc. I'm attempting to model the missing parts, but I'm a complete noob at making meshes and I can't seem to actually create anything to fill the gaps left by deleting the underwear. Is there some way to fill this hole so that I can subdivide the area and start working the mesh, or how else do I fill this gap? Extruding the faces on the rim of the hole doesn't work because I can't get them connected at the center. Can somebody please tell me how to get the gaps filled? Here's an image. How would I close that gap? http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/Images/126728

Where do you have Skyrim installed? It's very important to know this. Is it just on your C: drive, or is it a Steam folder... etc.

I think it's just Oblivion being Oblivion. I can't be sure, but I think it happens to everyone. Nobody really cared in 2006, when Oblivion's graphics were exploding people's heads.

It seems like the 5450 scales heavily with screen resolution. At 1080p you probably wouldn't be able to play at all, while at 1440x900 you'd probably manage low settings, and at 800x600 or lower you might get high settings. Skyrim's screen resolution already affects performance much more than most other games based on Nvidia's benchmarks, so I'm guessing that your resolution is going to determine most of the fps hit.