Even though this is not a gaming site, I could not pass on the occasion to show these realtime rendered screenshots of one of the greatest games of all time. Congratulations to Bethesda for making this game, and hats off to all the modders who make Oblivion even better by improving many aspects of the graphics and gameplay. The screenshots are provided in 1920 x 1200 (original Res - big thumbnail) and 1280 x 800 (small thumbnail) for people who use 17/19" LCDs. System : Dual Opteron 285 + ATI Radeon X1900 XTX. Here is my Oblivion.ini file. Here are the mods I play with. As of now (2006/06/06) I am 253 hours into the game with one character, and far from finished :)
My character is a Wood Elf named Tûr-En-Dae. I play with a time rate of 10 (12 Oblivion hours = 72 minutes real time instead of 24 mns in the original game), a FOV of 85°, and a respawn rate of one month (instead of 3 days in vanilla Oblivion). Graphics settings : HDR + antialiasing 4X + anisotropic filtering 16X, iMinGrassSize=80, fGrassEndDistance=16000, fGrassStartFadeDistance=14000. I'll trade fps for a superior graphics quality anytime.
I recommend playing with the LOD textures / normal maps replacement packs (I use Shaja's and Jarrod's textures). The Natural Environment mod is also an excellent way to improve atmospheric settings. I also use the Parallax cities mod to give more depth to the cities architectures. And the Illumination Within and Cities at night mods give a beautiful look to the cities at night.
Each town in Cyrodiil has a distinct architecture. You can buy houses and furnish them, if you have enough gold... I recommend the Bank of Cyrodiil mod, where you can deposit gold and earn interests. With the House display rooms mod, you can show your trophies to the world (mmh, that is to your addicted friends :).
