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The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion GPU Performanceby Anand Lal Shimpi on 4/26/2006 1:07 PM EST
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- GPUs
100 Comments
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hkBst - Sunday, May 28, 2006 - linkIf as you say the error in your measurements is about 5% which for a 30fps score is about 1.5 fps then it is not warranted to post measurements like 31.4 fps. The .4 in there means absolutely nothing. It is clearly not a significant digit. You should either perform multiple measurements to reduce the error or post the less accurate results which you _actually measured_. Reply
markshrew - Sunday, May 14, 2006 - linkI like the new graphs you've been using lately, what software is it? thanks :) Reply
Warlock15th - Monday, May 08, 2006 - linkCheck page 7 of this article, titled "Mid Range GPU Performance w/ Bloom Enabled"
How come the both the vanilla 6800 and the 6600GT outperform the 6800GS? It hing the resutls for these cards were somehow entered wrongly while making the performance graphics... Reply
othercents - Thursday, May 04, 2006 - linkSome people need to look at the overall picture on video cards instead of just saying that ATI is the best because it runs the best on Oblivion. If you look at other reviews with games like HL2 and Doom3 you will start to get a different picture of what card is better for you. Don't take this one review buy a new video card and think it is a cure for all games. Especially for whoever said that the 7900GT sucked. That is a great card and performs well in most game. If you don't want it just mail it to me.
Personally I think I will wait until the new video cards come out before I purchase anything specifically for this game. Why pay the $300-$400 on a new card that performs alright when there should be new ones out near the end of the year that will perform way better. Not to mention drivers that are in the works just for this game and the patches that are coming out. My x600 is playable, so I'm satisfied.
I guess if you really need that cutting edge performance then you won't mind spending the $1200 or more to buy SLI or Crossfire video cards. This is probably the same peopel who upgrade their desktops every 6 months because there is something else better available. However for the rest of us we should probably wait until the game has 6 months of patches and new video drivers before deciding on upgrading. Experience with HL2 and almost every other game tells me that performance will get better with time.
Other Reply
araczynski - Friday, April 28, 2006 - linki would love to see these benchmarks compared to another exactly the same run but WITHOUT grass enabled at all. everyone and their dog knows that the grass in this game is implemented very badly, and has a tremendous impact on performance.
the worst part is that the grass is quite frankly FUGLY! complete sticks out like a sore thumb in every scene i tried it in.
in any case. i'm running a firstname.lastname@example.com northwood/1gig/6800gt@ultra+/1280x1024,hdr,nograss,noshadows and it plays very nicely for me.
i would suspect that anyone with anything from the 7800+ & x1800+ families would be extremely happy with the game if they took off the grass and toned down the shadows. Reply
araczynski - Friday, April 28, 2006 - linkoh yeah, and it looks teh sexy from my projector on the wall at 1280x1024 :) Reply
JarredWalton - Friday, April 28, 2006 - linkI like having the grass. Without the grass, it's just yet another game with a flat, green texture representing the ground. That hasn't been acceptable since 2003. I do think the grass could do with a bit more variation (i.e., taller in some areas, shorter in others, more or less dense, etc.), but if the added variation also increased system demands, then forget it.
Of course, the grass isn't perfect. It doesn't bend around your character's feet/legs; when an object like heavy armor, a sword, a dead body, etc. falls down in tall grass, it can also make it a bit tricky to find. I do find myself disabling the grass at times just for that reason, not to mention shutting it off when there's too much going on and frame rates have slowed to a crawl. Every time I turn off the grass, though, it seems like I've started to turn Oblivion into Morrowind.
Obviously, we're still at the stage where game engines are only giving a very rough approximation of reality. We won't even discuss how the shadowing/shading/texturing on some faces and objects can look downright awful. We're at the point now where every increase in graphical realism requires an exponential increase in time by the programmers, artists, modelers, etc. as well as an exponential increase in computational power required to render the scenes. Reply
thisisatest - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkWow load up the bullshit. Not only are your framerates strange, but it seems that you somehow did something to make the x1900XTX perform worse than the x1900XT... which is impossible. The XTX bests the XT by at least 3-4FPS in the worst of cases, so we can't even consider a performance decrease to be within margin of error.
We know all the x1k Radeons best any nvidia card out there now in this game because of the simple fact that SM3.0 was done better on ATI and because of the massive pixel shading power the x1900 cards have.
I don't see any AA tests as well. You forgot to mention that the game looks like garbage without AA and I know many nvidia users that prefer bloom+AA than just HDR.
Thanks for wasting my time. Reply
JarredWalton - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkI'm not sure what benchmarks you're looking at, but only places where the XT comes out ahead of the XTX are in the city and dungeon benchmarks, and for all intents and purposes the two are tied. Due to the nature of benchmarking with a Bolivian (we're not playing back a recorded demo, but instead wandering through a location in a repeatable manner) the margin of error is going to be higher. The minimum frame rates are particularly prone to variations, as you might just happen to get a hard drive access that causes a frame rate drop in one run but not another.
The most important tests are by far the Oblivion gate areas, and trust me you will be seen plenty of them in real gameplay. Who cares if you get 70 frames per second or what ever in the dungeon if your frame rates dropped to 20 or lower outside? Looking at those figures, the XTX comes out about 3% faster, which is pretty much what you can expect from the clock speed increase. 625/1450 vs. 650/1550... if we're GPU limited (as opposed to bandwidth limited, which appears to be the case with all Bolivian), the XTX has a whopping 4% clock speed advantage. Throw in CPU and system limitations, and you're not going to be able to tell the difference between the XT and the XTX in actual use.
As for your assertion that the game looks like garbage without anti-aliasing, I strongly disagree, as I'm sure many others do. Just because you think AA is required doesn't mean everyone feels the same. I would take HDR rendering in a heartbeat over AA in this game. That's how I've been playing the game for well over 100 hours. When running at the native panel resolution of my LCD (1920x1200), anti-aliasing is something I worry about only when everything else is maxed out. My point isn't that you're wrong, but merely that you're wrong for saying that many people prefer bloom + anti-aliasing. *Some* people will prefer that, but far more likely is that people will prefer bloom without anti-aliasing over HDR, simply because it gives you higher frame rates. Reply
thisisatest - Friday, April 28, 2006 - linkAt least 2 different "benchmarks" where the XT is ahead of the XTX. Once I see crap like this, sort of makes me doubt everything they say.
Also we aren't told what settings were used in the drivers for each video card. That plays a huge role here. Reply
smitty3268 - Friday, April 28, 2006 - linkWell, all the tests that had the XT ahead of the XTX were obviously CPU bound, so for all intents and purposes you should have read the performance as being equal.
I would like to know a bit about the drivers though. Were you using Catalyst AI and does it make a difference? Reply
coldpower27 - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkQuite a nice post there, well said Jarred. Reply
JarredWalton - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkLOL - a Bolivian = Oblivion. Thanks, Dragon! :D (There are probably other typos as well. Sorry.) Reply
alpha88 - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkOpteron 165, 7800GTX 256meg
I run at 1920x1200 with every ingame setting set to max, HDR, no AA, (16x AF)
The game runs just fine.
I don't know what the framerates are, but whatever they are, it's very playable.
I have a few graphics mods installed (new textures), and the graphics are good enough that I randomly stop and take screenshots, the view looked so awesome. Reply
z3R0C00L - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkThe game is a glimpse at the future of gaming. The 7x00 series is old. True, nVIDIA were able to remain competitive with revamped 7800's which they now call 7900's but consumers need to remember that these cards have a smaller die space for a reason... they offer less features, less performance and are not geared towards HDR gaming.
Right now nVIDIA and ATi have a complete role reversal from the x800XT PE vs. 6800 Ultra. The 6800 Ultra performed on par or beat the x800XT PE. The kick was that the 6800 Ultra produced more heat (larger die) was louder (larger cooler) but had more features and was more forward looking. Right now we have the same thing.
ATi's x1900 series has a larger die, produces more heat (larger die means more voltage to operate) and comes with a larger cooler. The upside is that it's a better card. The x1900 series totally dominate the 7900 series. Some will argue about OpenGL others will point to inexistant flaws in ATi drivers... the truth is those who make these comments on both sides are hardware fans. Product wise.. the x1900 series should be the card you buy if you're looking for a highend card... if you're looking more towards the middle of the market the x1800XT is better then the 7900GT.
Remember performance, features and technology.. the x1k series has all of them above the 7x00 series. Larger die space.. more heat. Larger die space.. more features.
Heat/Power for features and performance... hmmm fair tradeoff if you ask me. Reply
aguilpa1 - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkinefficient game programming is no excuse to go out and spend 1200 on a graphics system. Games like the old Crytek Cryengine have proven they can provide 100% of the oblivion immersion and eye candy without crippling your graphics system and bring your computer to a crawl, ridicoulous game and test,....nuff said. Reply
dguy6789 - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkThe article is of a nice quality, very informative. However, what I ponder more than GPU performance in this game is CPU performance. Please do an indepth cpu performance article that includes Celerons, Pentium 4s, Pentium Ds, Semprons, Athlon 64s, and Athlon 64 X2s. Firing squad did an article, however it only contained four AMD cpus that were of relatively the same speed in the first place. I, as well as many others, would greatly appreciate an indepth article speaking of cpu performance, dual core benefits, as well as anything else you can think of. Reply
coldpower27 - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkI would really enjoy a CPU scaling article with Intel based processors from the Celeron D's, Pentium 4's, and Pentium D's in this game.
frostyrox - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkIt's something i already knew but I'm glad Anandtech has brought it into full view. Oblivion is arguably one of the best PC games i've seen in 2006, and could very well turn out to be one of the best we'll see all year. Instead of optimizing the game for the PC, Bethesda (and Microsoft indirectly) bring to the PC a half *ss, amature, embarassing, and insanely bug-ridden 360 Port. I think I have the right to say this because I have a relatively fast PC (a64 3700+, x800 xl, 2gb cosair, sata2 hdds, etc) and I'm roughly 65hrs into Oblivion right now. Next time Bethesda should use the Daikatana game engine - that way gamers with decent PCs might not see framerates of 75 go to 25 everytime an extra character came onto the screen and sneezed. Right now you may be thinking that I'm mad about all this. Not quite. But I will say this much: next time I get the idea of upgrading my pc, I'll have to remember that upgrading the videocard may be pointless if the best games we see this year are 360 ports running at 30 frames. So here's to you Bethesda and Microsoft, for ruining a gaming experience that could've been so much more if you gave a d*mn about pc gamers. Reply
trexpesto - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkMaybe Oblivion should be $100? Reply
bobsmith1492 - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkI'm playing with a 9700 mobility (basically 9600 ultra) in my laptop with a P-M and a gigger at 1024, medium settings about like you set it. Where in the world did all those extra settings come from though (shadows, water)? Is that something outside the game itself? Reply
ueadian - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkI played this game fine on my X800XL with high settings.. Yeah it PROBABLY dipped into the 20's but honestly I never really noticed "lag". I shortcircuited my X800XL by stupidly putting a fan with a metal casing on top of it it went ZZZZT and died. I bought a 7900 GT for 299.99 and voltmoded it to GTX speeds and I really don't notice a difference while playing the game. Yeah I'm sure if I payed attention to FPS I'd see it, but really, the only place I noticed lag with my X800XL at high settings was by oblivion gates, and my 7900 GT at 680 core 900 mem locks up near oblivion gates as well. I was sort of forced to "upgrade" my card, but the 7900 GT is the best value for the money right now considering you can do a pen mod to get it to run PAST GTX speeds fairly easy. I have a crappy CRT who's max resolution is 1024x768 and dont plan on upgrading it anytime soon, so I don't need 512mb memory to throw the resolution up to goddly high settings, besides, im pretty blind, I find it easier to play most online games like FPS's at lower resolution just to gain an advantage. Oblivion is near perfection as a GAME it's the most enjoyable game I've ever played, and I've been playing games since Doom. Yeah the engine does suck, and I was really disapointed to have my brand new top of the line video card actualy STUTTER in a game, but really, does it completely ruin the whole game for you? If you have played it you know that it doesn't. Reply
thisisatest - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - link7900 series isn't what I consider to be the top of the line. There is high end and there is top of the line. The top of the line is clear. Reply
poohbear - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkim really curious to see how dualcore cpus perform as Oblivion is supposed to take advantage of multithreading. if anandtech could do a cpu performance chart that'd be great. firingsquad did a cpu performance chart but only @ 2 resolutions, 800x600 & 1280x1024, they found significant differences between dualcore and singlecore on 800x600 but no diff on 1280x1024. now, i play @ 1024x768 on my 6800GT, so wondering if a dualcore would help in that resolution. also, if u could investigate some of the supposed tweaks for dualcores and if they truly work that'd be great too. thanks. Reply
Eris23007 - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
A friend of mine is playing it on a 3.4GHz Northwood; he told me that when he enabled HyperThreading he got an immediate ~10% (or so) improvement.
That's a pretty good indication that dual cores will help a *lot*, in my view... Reply
mpeavid - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - link10% is VERY pooor multi threading performance. A decent multi threaded app should give 40-60 and higher for highlt efficient codes.
nullpointerus - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkHT isn't the same as having dual cores. IIRC, ~10% improvement from HT is rather typical in certain areas where multiple cores have significantly better returns. Reply
Akaz1976 - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkAnyone have any idea how 9800PRO compares to x800? Reply
hoppa - Friday, April 28, 2006 - linkWhat this test fails to mention is that I'm running a 9800 pro, Athlon XP 3000+, 1.5 gigs of ram, at 1280x768, and the game runs quite well even at medium settings. This game is very stressful at maximum everything but still manages to run incredibly well on older rigs and lower settings. Had I not played this game, after seeing this article I would've thought that it'd be impossible on my rig, but the truth is I've got plenty of computing power to spare. Reply
xsilver - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link9800pro is considered midrange/lowend now -- i guess that article is coming later
my guess is aprox 10% less than the lowest card on each graph besides the 7300gs (also you dont have HDR) Reply
Yawgm0th - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link...or Oblivion is playable with an average of 20 FPS. I did a benchmark of my own (at a big Oblivion gate with 6-10 enemies and several allies fighting) with settings completely maxed (everything at it's highest except AA) at 1280x960, and my system pulled framerates slightly better than the 7900GT according to the FRAPS results. More importantly, the game is completely playable in all areas. Framerates are low for about four seconds anytime I enter a new area through a door of some kind, but that's not unusual for most games. After those first couple seconds, things pick up and I see no reason for the game to appear to have such abysmal performance as the article would indicate. My system consists of the following:
2x1GB of Patriot 2-3-2 at 205MHz in dual-channel
Venice: 274x9 (about 2.47GHz)
7800GT with a slight overclock
Audigy 2
XP Pro x64 with latest nVidia drivers
Furthermore, that RAM was a recent upgrade. I had the game maxed with 1GB of the same stuff in single-channel.
At this point, I'm convinced that either there's something wrong with FRAPS (and there's certainly something different that caused the low frames in this article, because I shouldn't be outperforming the Anandtech test system when it's better than mine) or that the game is completely playable with mid-20s framerates. I don't think I've ever played a 3D game and found anything less than high-30s to be playable.
ueadian - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkYep you nailed it that's my exact feeling. I played the game with my X800XL and it was very playable on high settings, oblivion gates killed my computer but not enough to drive me insane, other then that i didnt see any lag other then after entering a new area. Benchmarks are overrated I played Counter-Strike : Source at 20-30 fps for a year just fine and when I got a card to do 50+ fps miminum I really didn't notice that much of a difference. Reply
TejTrescent - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkCrazy.
Testing just now, I got 20-30 on my system, no matter where I was, with a bit higher than those medium settings.
The game's ENTIRELY playable at even 18.
Dunno how, but it doesn't feel choppy when it falls, as long as it's above 15. Weird. Reply
dhei - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkLaugh, real excitement comes from online play. Might as well pay $15 a month for a game with just as good graphics that is updated constantly. Plus you can play missions and fight monsters yourself just like a single player game if thats your bag or slay other people that are actull people online.
Looking at screenshots, i've seen 4 year old MMO games that look better after they got free graphics updates. /shrug
I never understood why people pay for single player games like this. :D Reply
kmmatney - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkYou really can't judge the graphics of Oblivion by screenshots. The actual look and feel is much more impressive than the screen shots show. Reply
ueadian - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkAgreed. Screenshots do not to ANY game justice. HL2 didnt really impress me visualy with screenshots, but then I played the game all the way through and was blown away by the graphics. Reply
poohbear - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link"i've seen 4 year old MMO games that look better after they got free graphics updates. /shrug "
name one
bobsmith1492 - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkWhat's "mmo" ?? Reply
xsilver - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkwhen a cow is on crack it cant say "moo" properly :P
Massivly Multiplayer Online
as mentioned before its difficult to play a game that has no end and is pressuringly addictive if you join a guild/faction
eg. most deaths that have resulted from gaming have been from players of such games; most recently from WoW i think Reply
dhei - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkDark Age of Camelot. Reply
JarredWalton - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkI can't say I'd even begin to consider DOAC as better looking graphics. But if that's what you like, more power to you. Reply
dhei - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - link
I can't say I'd even begin to consider DOAC as better looking graphics. But if that's what you like, more power to you.
Thats easy to say when you prob don't play it currently. It has all the graphics features you see in Oblivion minus maybe HDR. Reply
ueadian - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkLol are you serious? DAoC might look better while you are smoking the reefer bud but I've played it many times and Oblivion blows it away graphicaly. Reply
dhei - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkWell your doing drugs to think oblvion has good graphics. I consider them medicore compared to other games of same kind, has I have seen people play the game.
DAOC graphics look a ton better to me imo...drug free.. Reply
hondaman - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkWhy play oblivion instead of MMO?
1. No monthly fees
2. Oblivion has an end. MMO doesnt. Thats a good thing for those of us with lives, but little self control.
3. No annoying kids to deal with.
4. No annoying cliques
5. No annoying server downtimes.
6. Not having to answer "a/s/l" every 30 seconds.
There is a pleasant serenity about single player RPG's that is impossible with MMO. Reply
TejTrescent - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkBut hmm.
My rig is no where close to the rig that you guys used for comparison, and I don't know my exact framerates because I've not yet ran FRAPS with Oblivion, but..
My 3500+ Newcastle, not overclocked, with 2GB of Corsair/Mushkin running dual channel at 2.5-3-3-7, with my AGPx8 6800OC from BFGTech (not overclocked any further either).. I pull highly playable framerates (aka no choppiness unless I'm getting jumped by 6+ Daedric mages, that lightning is killer) at settings MILDLY better than the medium GPU ones (though still 1024x768, just higher fade rates), no tweaks on either. I can even run MediaMonkey for music in the background without any choppy feelings.
I guess Oblivion isn't very CPU dependant or gains anything from multithreads really or something, because huh. I mean, I can't believe my crappy 3500+ is keeping decent pace with an FX60. o_o And better RAM. Just huh. I can generally tell if a framerate falls below 24 thanks to FPS games being painful at any lower than that.. and just huh. Weiird. Reply
JarredWalton - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkI would say there's a good chance your framerates are below 20 on a regular basis in the wilderness. FX-60, 7900 GT SLI, 2GB RAM, 2x150GB Raptors, and at Fort Bloodford looking towards the closest Oblivion Gate, I pull 13-15 FPS. (1920x1200, most detail settings at high.) I've also found that lowering a lot of settings doesn't have much of an impact. The various "fade" settings don't do much for me.
Open the console and type "TDT" to see your frame rates. I personally find anyting above 15 FPS to be acceptable for Oblivion, but opinions vary. :) Reply
TejTrescent - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkWell.. I'll check it out later tonight, but if they are, it's absolutely the smoothest sub 20fps I've ever seen.
Lot more playable than UT2004, Painkiller, FarCry, or... pretty much anything else on this comp. XD Reply
TejTrescent - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkWish there was an edit because I feel stupid replying to myself, but. Huh.
18-30 outside commonly, 18-35 in the city, and consistent 25-35 in dungeon areas.
I am so so confused right now. The 18 isn't even noticeable. How did they.. what did they.. wha.. Guess it's just the slower pace making it less noticeable.. Reply
nullpointerus - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkUh...I'm not a graphics guru, but is it possible that the dips in fps are smoother? If we draw a graph with "1" indicating a frame draw and "x" indicating stalling of some kind - such as processing sound, physics, or waiting on the GPU hardware - then I can illustrate what I'm talking about.
1xx1xx1xx1xx1xx (20 fps on a 60Hz display - balanced)
1xxxx11xx1xxx1x (20 fps on a 60Hz display - choppy)
Or do 3D games not work like this? Reply
Crassus - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
This first part will focus on high-end and mid-range PCIe GPU performance and future articles will look at CPU performance as well as low-end GPU and AGP platform performance if there is enough demand for the latter two.
Here, demand *wave* (at least concerning an AGP platform review). I've got a trusty K8N Neo2 with a 939 3000+ and a 6800 GT that was sort of standard about 1 1/2 years ago and I'm trying to figure out if I would gain a FPS increase worth talking about switching over to PCIe, while staying in about the same price range, or getting a 7800 AGP, or just turning down settings and saving the money.
Cheers and thanks for an article that I was very anxious to read. Reply
Ozenmacher - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkEveryone argues about how bad the performance is outside. I am running a 7900 GT and I was getting around 20 fps outside, I truned the grass off completely and now I get over 30. And honestly, I don't even notice it. I tjhink the game looks better than the rather lame looking grass. Reply
Madellga - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkI can't see any pictures in this article. I've tried both IE and Firefox, at 2 different computers.
Is it only me or anyone else has the same? Reply
JarredWalton - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkCan you see the graphs even? Reply
nicolasb - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkI can't see any of the pictures either, including the graphs.
I'm getting really fed up of this happening in Anandtech articlres: it's been happening on and off for months, now. Could you guys please <b>sort it out</b>? It's really very unprofessional to have allowed the problem to go on for this long. Reply
JarredWalton - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkNothing has changed on the images in a long time. Are you surfing from work or home? Do you have any ad blocking software? I suppose it could also be browser settings. I know you can configure Internet Explorer and Firefox to not load images by default, or to only load images for the originating web site. The article content comes from www.AnandTech.com or as the images come from images.AnandTech.com. There's really nothing for us to sort out if the problem is on your end, but hopefully my comments will help you solve your issues. Reply
Madellga - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkI found it. The feature causing the problem is Privacy Control. I just turned off and now the page works fine. Reply
JarredWalton - Friday, April 28, 2006 - linkI'm glad to hear you got it working. If it's any consolation, I've felt that every release of Norton Internet Security since 2002 has actually been a step backwards. The latest release seems more bulky, slow, and more prone to causing errors. There was a time where I thought Norton Utilities was the greatest thing ever in terms of useful software. Windows 95 started to reduce its usefulness, and as far as I'm concerned windows XP pretty much killed it off. These days, I feel like I can get better overall quality from free software in many cases.
I think the only reason Symantec is still in business is due to all of their bundling agreements with various computer manufacturers. So many systems come with Symantec software preinstalled as a 90 day trial, but lucky for me I've found that 90 days gives me more than enough time to uninstall the junk! I've found that a hardware firewall is generally much more useful, in that it's less likely to cause problems, either with web sites or with system performance. Reply
Madellga - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkIt was definetely not the browser. All options are default.
Add blocking is turned off. I have to find which Norton feature is causing the issue. Interesting enough, the problem seems to happen only at Anandtech. Reply
Madellga - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkThanks for the reply. I am surfing from home and I have this problem since a couple of weeks. Based on the comments above, the only thing I have running that could be the problem is Norton Internet Security......
I just turned off the Norton Firewall and reloaded the page. Now it works!
Jeez, it sounds silly but I expected more from Symantec. And my copy is an original one, legally purchased - no hacking.
That feels awful....
nullpointerus - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkReally? I follow most of this site's articles, and I've never run into this problem. Reply
cgrecu77 - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkthis is the article I've been waiting for, I was leaning towards upgrading to x1800xt but wasn't sure.
The game is easily one of the best i've played (and it's my first RPG, I'm a TBS fan). While it doesn't have the depth and replay value of series like Civ or HOMM, it's still far better than any FPS (can't compare with other RPGs) I ever played.
Whoever says that the graphics in Oblivion are not the best is just full of b..t or lacks the hardware to turn everything on, looking from the top of the mountain at the Imperial City on a clear moon night it simply breathtaking.
The gameplay and interface are also among the best I've seen and there are few occasions where I think: "this should have been improved". The inventory system is probably a weaker point, but even that is debatable (it's quite obvious that much thought was put into it but maybe the decisions taken there are not the greatest).
However, performance is a big issue. My system is middle to upper range (a64 3200, 2gb ram, x850XT) and I can barely play at 1280x1024 with all sliders to the top and without shadows or AA.
Outdoor I get ~20fps which is ok, actually even excelent considering the huge number of objects rendered (especially grass and trees) - and acceptable since most battles are inside. What I don't get is why I have such a poor performance indoors, there are moments in a heated dungeon battle (especially where there are many fires, like inside sigil towers) where frame rates drops to low teens (from mid 50s). Graphics are average in those building, I only battle 2-3 opponents or less, the map is quite small (since any door leads to loading times )- so I don't get it, how come the game slows to a crawl there. I would consider this an obvious place where optimizations are lacking. Another thing that's missing is a way to alter the grass length (from the game menu, most people only look there to alter settings) and a few other things that were proven to greatly improve performance.
oneils - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkThe hit to performance in dungeons may be due to a mix of having the shadow detail and specular lighting (or filtering?) set too high. I have the same problem with my 6800gt. Especially when I am fighting spell casters. If we are both casting spells, the system crawls. Reply
DigitalFreak - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkOpteron 165 @ 2.51Ghz
Geforce 7900GTX SLI
Check the tweak guides. There is A LOT you can do to make it run smoother without lowering graphic settings. Reply
bollwerk - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkI also have 7900GTX SLI and it also runs fine for me with maxed settings at 1920x1200. (Athlon 64 X2 3800+, 2GB ram, A8N32SLI) It's obviously not high FPS, but it's also not choppy at all as far as I can tell. Totally playable for an RPG. I'm loving it and I'm glad I didn't get the 360 version. The PC mods are soooo worth it. Reply
JarredWalton - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkBut the tweak guides ARE lowering the graphics settings, just in a different way. I'm okay with 1920x1200 at modified details on 7900GT, but there are still times when frame rates drop into the single digits. Reply
Yawgm0th - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkNo, they're not. I mean, you can do tweaks that involve lowering settings, but that are tons you can do that improve graphics and graphics performance at the same time. Reply
JarredWalton - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkFor example? I'd really like to get more graphics quality for less graphics work. Reply
kmmatney - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkI would also like to see the performance without Bloom and HDR. A lot of times, I prefer games without this effect (its often not implemented very well). PLays well on my setup without AA and bloom, and with AF, at 1280 x 1024. Sempron 2800+ @ 2.4 GHz, and modded X800GTO2 running at X850XT speeds. I'd rather play at the higher resolution than lower resolution + Bloom. Reply
OrSin - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkMy problem is half the hipe of this game is that you a need a monster system to use it.
Does any one remeber when a game bragged about the fast that it doesn't need powerful card to play it. Now its just the opposite. No wonder game will not be made for hard core gamers soon. I just can't understand have to pay $400 for a card that only 1-2 games will actually need. When in 6 months that same card is $250 maybe 6 games out might need it. Program in this age are jsut lazy or the products are being rushed. Can we get some optization and have people talk about great graphics on $150 cards.
As much as I hate consoles I'm leaning to them more and more. They will always the play the game good and mulitplayer support internet support is here (not this game).
I just hate the UI of most of them. Reply
cgrecu77 - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkconsoles are not great and they're a waste of money - think about Oblivion, the game barely runs on 6 months box (Xbox360). Do you honestly think that in 5 years a top of the line PC game will run on an XBox? I bought my x850XT last year for less than $300 on eBay and I can play this game at my lcd's native resolution (1280x1024). I'm pretty sure that with my current video card I'll be able to play games for 1 year or so and then I can probably buy the X1900XT for ~300 and that will give me another 2 years.
Lower the resolution a little and you can extend it even further.
The biggest danger is to avoid buying middle range/ extrem upper range - this way you'd be screwed. If I would've bought a 6600GT last year it would've been a bad decision. If I'd buy a x1800GTO now it would be a poor decision also, because it can barely play the new games, in one year it'll become obsolete. The trick is to buy things that last 2 years at a decent price.
The problem with consoles are that if you buy beyond the first year or two you are actually buying an obsolete piece of hardware (think about the original Xbox, still selling - it's p3 with geforce 2 or 3). In the past consoles had a big advantage by running at low res, but once hdtv becomes mainstream they would have to support pc resolutions. If you have an hdtv you know that low-res content looks like crap with or without upconverting to a higher res (take a picture at 400x300 and enlarge it with Photoshop to 1600x1200 and you'll see what I'm talking about).
pnyffeler - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkIs there any way anyone can look at these numbers and not just by an Xbox360? I had a feeling my 6800GT wouldn't cut it, but wow! It's games like this that make the feasibility of upgrading your PC to play the latest game ridiculously stupid. Spend the $470 to get the console and the game.
If you really feel the need to spend more money than that, I'd recommend investing in a nice HDTV. Oblivion in hi-def from your couch is about as good as it gets.
Now if I could just get the Mrs. to stop hogging the TV... Reply
mesyn191 - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkIn every bench instance shown they're testing at a higher resolution than the X360 will ever display...
Also the X360 version only looks good if you've got the HDTV to go with it, otherwise it really does look like crap on a SDTV.
Gameplay wise this game is very very good, not perfect, but better than any other game I've played. Reply
erwos - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkThat's flatly untrue. The X360 has a 1280x1024 resolution with the VGA adapter. Also, the PC version would also look like crap on an SDTV, so that's not really a valid point against the 360.
-Erwos Reply
mesyn191 - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkThat is the X360's built in video scalar doing the work though, max that any game renders real time ATM on the X360 is 720p due to the limited amount of EDRAM available. Real and not scaled 1080i may be possible, but only if the developer specifically designs the game for it by cutting out effects, reducing textures, etc. and does not use FSAA.
My point about how the X360 games look on a SDTV is valid as most people don't use thier PC's with a SDTV or any TV at all, they use a CRT or LCD monitor... The opposite is almost never true in the X360's case. Reply
hondaman - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkI would have upgraded my "crappy" 7800gtx had I known how bad my FPS really is.
I love this game. Easily the best game I've ever played in my life. Its not perfect, and I wont defend it as being so, but overall, its magnificent. I have over 270 game hours, and still havent done everything there is to do. Reply
mpeavid - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkThe engine is extremely inefficient. The quests are not really that interesting.
The NPCs are stiffs.
Overall? 8/10.
The game engine needs major tweaking.
FYI - eliminate the grass totally and you can increase your frame count by as much as 50%. There is also a tweak to increase threads (another possible 50% increase).
I went from 20 fps outdoors to near 30 fps with higher visual settings (except the grass part) Reply
Spoonbender - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkYou know, it seems they've compiled the game in debug mode... :)
That's how much they've bothered tweaking performance. ;)
When the game crashes (which happens to be every time I exit the game, or alt-tab too much), I get an access violation, always on special debug locations, like 0xCDCDCDCD or 0xFEEEFEEE.
So, yay for high performance tweaking. Reply
JarredWalton - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkLowering grass height and detail is probably the best tweak you can make. I set mine for "60" in terms of density and half as tall (I think?) and performance went WAY up without seriously ruining (IMO) the appearance.
As for the game, it depends on what you're after. I really like the game, but the UI has some major issues. I think the quests are relatively well done overall. I love the huge game world (huge in content, not in square miles). Eventually, though, a lot of the game becomes repetitive. I've been doing too many side quests; time to hit the main quest in earnest.... :) Reply
kmmatney - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkI installed a mod for the UI (BTMod) to make the UI windows larger and its a huge improvment. I dont bother with Bloom, and performance is acceptable on my modded X800GTO2 and Sempron @ 2.4 GHz. Reply
blackbrrd - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkUsing the BTmod myself, it works for me ;)
I would like a few more shortcut keys myself, but other than that, it took me about 2 minutes to figure out how to use the interface. The 8 free shortkeys that you can assign to weapons/spells/potions etc works well, you just want more shortkeys :P
I am playing the game on a laptop with a radeon 9600. It obviosly doesn't look as good as in the pictures, but it runs ok, so I would say that the graphics engine scales nicely for any graphics card bought the last 2-3 years*
*A friend of mine has a geforce fx5900 and he gets horrible performance - there should have been a seperate shader 1.x path for those cards.
I do agree that the game is just nearly finished, for instance the textures for 256mb and 512mb graphics cards could be much larger, there are several mods available as it is, but it should have been in the game.
All in all I think it was a good compromise between launching the game as early as possible and performance wise. Personally I haven't had any problems with the game except for multitasking which won't work properly if you don't pull down the console first :P **
**The game has quirks - but its a good game, and there are work arounds. :) Its also the first game that have made me actually consider upgradeing/buying a proper gameing machine. Reply
kmmatney - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkThere is a shader 1.X path - look up Oldblivion. it allows the game to run on the 5900 quite well, from what I've heard. Reply
Ryan Norton - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkthe elderscrolls.com/forums do crack me the fuck up... there is literally no aspect of the game no matter how glaringly mis-implemented that the fanboys will not defend to their last gasp.
I don't have a link for it, but the website/guy that does "tweak guides" for 3D games put up a super-lengthy one for Oblivion. I'd already stumbled onto some of the things but it was still good for making the game seem a little smoother outdoors.
I love the line about outdoors performance making users contemplate $1200 on video cards... until I started playing Obliv I'd always thought SLI a waste of money, but now I catch myself thinking "hmm another 7800GTX is 'only' another $450"... must restrain self. Reply
Powermoloch - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkI had been waiting for quite a while for anandtech's take on oblivion. And I'm very surprised that you got alot of GPUs tested out for us. Especially being a x850xt agp owner, I'm very pleased that it has enough juice to play @ 1280x1024 at almost @ med-high settings lol.
Kudos for the great job guys, great benchmark results ;). Reply
Frallan - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkI agree!!!
Excelent Reveiw!!!
But as an owner of older Hardware Id love to know where my 6800Gt stumbles in on the list. Usually I run it @ 425/1150 which is almost Ultra speeds but....
Please any1 who is in the know??? Reply
bob661 - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkYou can compare it to the 6800GS. They're the same card. Reply
michal1980 - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkplaying the xbox 360 version.
and really, it does not look much better then like hlf2.
I'm sorry but anyone that says (not that anyone here has) that this is a great engine with great graphics needs to take a break.
there can be alot going on sometimes, but the draw distance sucks, loads every 2 mins. controls are a little wishy washy.
its an ok game, but at times seems way to unfocused. with a story line that is weak at best. Reply
Jackyl - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkCorrect. The graphics are not "next gen" as was hyped. The problem with the performance of the gamebryo engine is that it doesn't support culling, hidden-surface removal. It draws everything, which causes a lot of slow down. If you are outside, standing behind a building, it still calculates whatever is on the other side, even though you can't see it. Bad design IMO for a "next gen" engine.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkOkay, I'm not going to dispute your claims, but how on earth do you know that the engine isn't doing HSR? Damn, that was one of the first things that was discussed in terms of 3D engine optimization in my Graphics class. I'm not sure how you prove what they are or aren't doing without seeing the code, though.
I also have to say that I don't think the Gamebryo engine is as bad as you're making it out to be. I see very little in the way of load times (the "loading" screens are mostly there for Xbox360), large outdoor areas, relatively nice effects (HDR, reflections, etc.), and generally interesting gameplay mechanics. You're certainly not going to get all of these things from other engines on the market. Doom3 would choke outdoors, for example.
What we need is an engine that offers:
Doom3 indoor areas
Far Cry outdoors
HL2/FEAR shaders
Dungeon Siege load times
Any UI that doesn't have console roots! UGH! Sell... Are you sure? Buy... Are you sure? Heaven forbid that we actually sell more than one type of item at a time. How about something like Fallout's barter interface, with a few tweaks to bring it into 2006 era? Also, what the hell is the point of "maximum gold" for a shop. "I can only buy $500 worth of stuff at a time, but if you sell things to me one at a time, I can effectively buy out your whole inventory!" Thank you Bethesda for dumbing down the economic system. Maybe they should have more magical weapons readily available, and then allow you to trade equipment to get them recharged? Naw, real bartering would make too much sense.... Reply
nts - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkHidden surface removal is obviously there, every game has it lol :p
What this game needs and is missing is some sort of Occlusion Culling (not sending down geometry that won't be visible in the final frame, eg terrain/trees/grass behind city walls).
MrCoyote - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkWhat good does it do to benchmark this game? The engine they licensed for this game is very limited in performance and unoptimized <b>(GameByro)</b>. Please wait until a patch comes out, then benchmark the game. This performance limit can be seen in various reviews across the web. A 7900GT or X1900XT should be getting more than 20-30FPS on this game. Reply
munky - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkPeople are not gonna wait for a patch to buy the game, and the whole premise of improved performance with a patch is uncertain. This review is useful for those who have the game, and would like to know if a certain upgrade would give them a significant improvement, or would just like to see how their performance compares to those with other video cards. Reply
Jackyl - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkThat's very true that the game is very much in an "unfinished" stage and was released too soon. Any professional developer knows that the Gamebyro engine has it's share of performance problems. It is not in the same league of engines as others. Why they licensed this engine is beyond me.
Warning...Don't post anything even remotely negative about the game on the official forums. Fanboys will be waiting to lash back at you. Yet people are complaining left and right on the forums of the performance problems, bugs, and interface problems. The PC game looks nothing but just a console port. Bad inventory screen system and GUI. Hopefully a 3rd party modder can change these things. Reply
poohbear - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkthe bad inventory has already been resolved w/ a user mod. look for the Btmod-2.20 Reply
nts - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkThe X1800XT can be had for less than the 7900GT and performs better...
Why was it not include it in the Mid Range graphs?
SiliconDoc - Friday, July 17, 2009 - linkWow, how quickly the complaining masses forget. $1,200.00 for two ati cards - LOL
And here I've been told by all the disgruntled red fans that nvidia is the greedy scalping horror....
It's so nice that anandtech doesn't delete their old reviews.
Once again I find out the red fans have been deceiving me all along.
This is great - another myth of the web, exploded thanks to the web. Reply
Spoelie - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkSo very true
For the money, the x1800xt 512mb seems a better deal. Reply
bob661 - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkJust checked on Newegg and the prices are the same unless you go with the 256MB version of the X1800XT. Reply
bob661 - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - linkOn Zipzoomfly, the 7900GT is a bit cheaper. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - linkWe inadvertently left it out of the midrange tests; I just updated the graphs and conclusion to reflect its inclusion.
Take care,
Anand Reply


text:
The last time I saw Sheldon Jeter was at the NCAA Tournament in Orlando, where he was wide-eyed while watching the Panthers during their shoot-around before their second-round game against Colorado. Jeter looked like a kid window-shopping outside a storefront. …
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(US) Unquiet Thought Blog: "Saturday morning quotes 5.30: Tempo and pitch II" (11 Dec 2015)
"The is the second of two posts examining tempo and pitch in early music. Naturally, we can only speculate as to the precise nature and relative importance of tempo and pitch in historical times. But we can certainly point out how specialists and performers of what we call early music today have misconstrued scant available information on tempo and pitch to reinforce a thoroughly modern aesthetic. Also, where tempo and pitch were ...
(SE) BIS CD Release: "Bach – Lutheran Masses, Volume 2"
"Johann Sebastian Bach: Lutheran Mass in A major, BWV 234; Lutheran Mass in F major, BWV 233
Marco Gioseppe Peranda (1625–75): Missa in A minor
Bach Collegium Japan / Masaaki Suzuki
Hana Blažiková, soprano (BWV 233 & 234); Joanne Lunn and Aki Matsui, sopranos (Peranda); Robin Blaze, counter-tenor; Katsuhiko Nakashima, tenor (BWV 234); Gerd Türk and Yusuke Fujii, tenors (Peranda); Peter Kooij, bass (BWV 233 & 234); Dominik Wörner, bass (Peranda)
By Bach's time, the traditional forms of church service had been fundamentally altered by the Reformation, and in German churches Latin had yielded to the country's own language. To an extent, however, ...
(US) Hyperallergic Article: Museum Sues Wikimedia for Hosting Copyrighted Photos of Its Public-Domain Artworks (by Benjamin Sutton, 08 Dec 2015)
"On October 28 the Reiss Engelhorn Museum (REM) in Mannheim, Germany, filed a lawsuit against the Wikimedia Foundation for making high-resolution images of public domain artworks from its collection available for download. The contested images include photos of works by the Rococo painter Anna Dorothea Therbusch, the Flemish still life painter Alexander Coosemans, and the Dutch Golden Age painter Jacob Ochtervelt, as well as a drawing of Michelangelo's Moses by Peter Anton von Verschaffelt and Cäsar Willich's circa-1862 portrait of Richard Wagner. ...
(US) 2016 OPERA NEWS Awards
Joseph Calleja, Elīna Garanča, Waltraud Meier, Anna Netrebko & José van Dam Named as 2016 OPERA NEWS Awards Recipients. Five Honorees to be Acknowledged for Contributions to the Opera World at the 11th Annual Awards Ceremony. ...
(SE) BIS CD Release: Vivaldi – Recorder Concertos
"Antonio Vivaldi: Concerto in G major, RV 443 (originally C major); Concerto in F major, RV 442; Concerto in C major, RV 444; Concerto in E minor, RV 445 (originally A minor); Concerto in C minor, RV 441; Concerto in A minor, RV 108 for recorder, 2 violins & b.c.; Concerto in D major, RV 92 for recorder, violin & b.c
Dan Laurin, recorder and musical direction
1B1 / Jan Bjøranger, leader
Anna Paradiso, harpsichord
Jonas Nordberg, theorbo/baroque guitar
The Swedish recorder virtuoso Dan Laurin has demonstrated his remarkable versatility on some thirty recordings for BIS, ranging from ...
(US) Bach Society Houston Pilot Project: "Bach in Schools"
"Bach had how many kids?!?" exclaimed students at Foster Elementary School when told that Johann Sebastian fathered 20 children. Bach Society Houston's new pilot project Bach in Schools is a 50-minute presentation for elementary school students focusing on J.S. Bach's life and music, featuring live performers from the Bach Society's orchestra and professional choir, and a real harpsichord. ...
(UK) Cambridge Early Music "Festival of the Voice" (12-15 May 2016)
"Cambridge Early Music's prestigious 2016 Festival of the Voice will run between Thursday 12 – Sunday 15 May [2016]. It will showcase many of the world's finest early music artists including: Vox Luminis, Voces8, The Gesualdo Six, Three Medieval Tenors and James Gilchrist, who will perform an eclectic range of music from medieval Conductus, Monteverdi, Lassus, Bach, Schubert and many others in some of Cambridge's most beautiful and historic venues. ...
(US) Art Seek Article: " First Of Its Kind: An Institute for Female Opera Conductors" (by Bill Zeeble, 03 Dec 2015)
"In a banner year of three new works from the Dallas Opera, the company this week launched a different kind of premiere: a week-long Institute for Women Conductors. This school may be the only one of its kind in the world. ....
(US) Piffaro "The Renaissance Band" & Google Cultural Institute
Google Cultural Institute is a hit with music groups enabling them to build storylines and interesting videos. Piffaro is highlighted in one of the latest Google Cultural Institute releases. Congratulations to Piffaro for ...
(US) Dance Magazine Article: "Google Now Lets You Travel the Dance World" (by Kristin Schwab, 04 Dec 2016)
"If I could dream up the most epic vacation for myself, it would be to travel from city to city to see every major dance company and historical dance site. (Hey boss, do you think this could count as a business trip?) Okay, so I'm going to assume that's not really in the cards for me right now. But Google's new Cultural Institute can get us a little closer to The Dream. Its arts "museum" went live this week, and there are plenty of dance (and fine arts, and opera, and music) goodies to explore. ...
(BE) Outhere Music Christmas Special
For those of you interested in purchasing some music CD's at Christmas time, Outhere Music is offering a 10% reduction off the price of it large inventory of CD titles. As there are too many early music CD titles to name ...
(DE) 4th Historical Dance Symposium - Dance in Italy, Italian Dance in Europe, 1400 - 1900 (25-29 May, 2016)
Location: Burg Rothenfels, 97851 Rothenfels, DE
"Our starting point on this path lies in the late Middle Ages, when the first dance books in history were written in Lombardy. The path leads us further through the highest flourishing of the Renaissance, when Italian dance masters and dancers were active in all European courts and laid important foundations for the later ballet. Special emphasis is placed on the period of the cultural duel with France in the 18th century and the development of the great ballet reform, before we finally end our journey in the Risorgimento, Italy's struggle for a unified statehood. ...
(US) Women Writers Project & Folger Shakespeare Library: "Early Modern Digital Pedagogies" (30 March 2016)
"The Women Writers Project and the Folger Shakespeare Library are offering a half-day workshop on digital humanities pedagogy. This workshop will focus on Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO), a new project that will provide online, encoded transcriptions of manuscripts from the Folger collection, and on Women Writers Online, a long-standing and well-loved collection of women's texts from 1526–1850. ...
(UK) Handel and Hendrix House December 2015 Newsletter
(From the recently renamed Handel and Hendrix House Newsletter)
The most recent newsletter from the Handel and Hendrix House Newsletter is out. If you are interested in getting tickets to some of the performances, you may want to do this promptly as most performances are already sold out. Note also the name change to reflect the fact that Jimi Hendrix once lived at the Handel House location (25 Brook Street, London). ...
(UK) The Guardian Article: " Earliest known biography of an African woman translated to English for the first time" (by Alison Flood, 03 Dec 2015)
"The earliest known book-length biography of an African woman, a 17th-century text detailing the life of the Ethiopian saint Walatta Petros, has been translated into English for the first time. ...
(US) CIncInatI.com Article: "Packing up to preserve a musical treasure" (by Janelle Gelfand, 3 Dec 2015)
From a recent article on the CIncInatI.com website. This article gives good insight of measures taken in moving a large library, over 1 million pieces of inventory, to a temporary location during a building restoration. It also gives us insight on the importance of cataloguing and even digitizing our music for the sake of its longevity. (Marc Paré, Editor EarlyMusicNews.org)
"Since summer, three librarians at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra have been up against a daunting deadline. They are trying to put up to a million pieces of music into as much order as possible by Monday, when it all has to be moved out of Music Hall to prepare for the historic hall's renovation in June. ...
(US) Unquiet Thoughts Blog: Saturday morning quotes 5.29: Tempo and pitch I
"Once upon a time, early music was distinguished by two factors: 1) instruments are tuned to A=415, and 2) it must be played as fast as possible. In fact the two phenomena are somewhat related. When strings are slackened a bit they ...
(UK) Opera Today Review: "Florilegium at Wigmore Hall" (by Claire Seymour, 29 Nov 2015)
"During this exploration of music from the Austro-German Baroque, Florilegium were joined by the baritone Roderick Williams in a programme of music which placed the music and career of J.S. Bach in the context of three older contemporaries: Franz Tunder (1614-67), Dietrich Buxtehude (1637-1701) and Heinrich Biber (1644-1704). ...
(UK) Opera Today Review: "Monteverdi by The Sixteen at Wigmore Hall" (by Claire Seymour, 12 Nov 2015)
"This was a concert where immense satisfaction was derived equally from the quality of musicianship displayed and the coherence and resourcefulness of the programme presented....
(UK) Cambridge Early Music 2016 Summer Schools Jesus College, Cambridge (31 July-7 August/7-13 August 2016)
"Join us for a taste of Spain at our 2016 Summer Schools. Next summer we will move to a new venue in the stunning setting of Jesus College in the heart of historic Cambridge. All bedrooms are high-standard single study-bedrooms with en-suite and tea-making facilities. Car parking on-site is also available to course members. ...
(DE) EarlyDance.org Calendar
A reminder to those of you who are early dance enthusiasts to visit the EarlyDance.org site for the list of upcoming dance dates, classes and concerts. EarlyDance.org is a central hub to the early dance community and is quite active. ....
(DE) Ketil Are Haugsand - Quick Tour of the Nürnberg Collection
From a recent posting on Facebook, Ketil Are Haugsand gives us a quick tour of the historical keyboards in the Nürnberg Collection. If you have not seen the collection, you can get a glimpse of it here ... but still best if you see it in person. (Marc, Editor EarlyMusicNews.org)
(UK) Genesis Sixteen Applications Now Open (Deadline date: 15 January 2016)
(From a recent The Sixteen newsletter)
"We are pleased to announce that Genesis Sixteen - the UK's leading free choral training programme for 18 - 23 year olds - is once again recruiting.
If you are passionate about choral singing and would like the opportunity to work closely with Harry Christophers and Eamonn Dougan, as well as ...
(DE) Covielo Classics New CD Release: "LA BATAILLE D'AMOUR Tabulatures & Chansons of the French Renaissance" (Nov. 2015) (Maria Ferré · Renaissance guitar, lute & direction)
"The desire of Maria Ferré was to combine two of the most important instruments for her, which have accompanied her during her musical career – the Renaissance lute and Baroque guitar – led her on her path towards the Renaissance guitar. The "master instrument" lute thereby profited from the sincere energy of the guitar. ...
(DE) L'Orfeo Barockorchester New CD Release: " "Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy - String symphonies Nr. I–VI (Vol.1)" (Sep 2015)
(Viennese built fortepiano from ca 1815)
Stretching the reach of historically informed performance (HIP), a fresh look on the performance of Mendelssohn with fortepiano injected into the performance.
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Place all ingredients except lettuce and avocado in a bowl and toss to mix. Serve on a bed of lettuce and garnish with slices of avocado.
Per serving - 259 calories, 14 gram fat (45% calories from fat), 8 gram protein, 31 gram carbohydrate, 9 gram fiber, 0 milligram cholesterol, 549 milligram sodium


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text:
Taking a moment this summer
This is the start of what Caryn is calling my "birthday week." It's also the anniversary of our meeting. She asked me months ago to block out the entire week, so her plans wouldn't have to compete with my schedule – so I have.
I still have some work to do, but I've cleared as much as I possibly could for seven whole days. It's a little odd, but freeing at the same time.
It kind of reminds me of summer holidays from school.
For one week, I have just a couple of dots to connect. The weight of tasks that must be completed this week are far less than I usually have to get done in a day; it's less than I used to accomplish on a single flight from one meeting to the next.
It's a little unnerving, yet somehow very comfortable at the same time.
I find it serendipitous that one of the things I must do this week is to write the script for next week's program on "Stress and MS." This week, I'm taking all stress out of my life. I'm just going to enjoy the summer for a week and try to be a kid again, at least mentally…
The words of a favorite poet, Louise Gluck, come to mind on this sunny summer Monday:


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6 Jun 2017 by Amy Fisher in Trip Planning and Cultural Experiences
It's Canada's 150th birthday and what better way to celebrate than checking off these 10 bucket list activities in Newfoundland & Labrador?
17 Mar 2017 by Amy Fisher in Food & Dining and Festivals & Events
Here are five delicious festivals and events that are worth travelling to because they go way above and beyond the 'run of the mill' food event.
16 Mar 2017 by Amy Fisher in Trip Planning , Top Destinations , Gros Morne National Park , Red Bay , Geology & Fossils and L'Anse aux Meadows
Newfoundland & Labrador is home to four UNESCO World Heritage Sites. No visit to the province would be complete without making it to at least one of them – and maybe you can collect the set.
It's funny to think 29,000 kilometres of coastline can fit onto a single flat screen TV.
At the most easterly point in North America, you'll find a treasure trove of talented writers. Some are local, some from abroad, and some from parts unknown.
29 Jul 2016 by Amy Fisher in Boat Tours , Hiking & Walking , Trip Planning , Top Destinations and Gros Morne National Park
One of the most difficult decisions you'll have when you reach Western Brook Pond is how you wish to experience it. One thing is for certain, once you've experienced Western Brook Pond, you won't soon forget it.
3 Jun 2016 by Guest Blogger in Boat Tours and Whale Watching
No matter how you choose to see them, with 22 species of whales here in Newfoundland and Labrador, you might need a scorecard to keep track.
3 Jun 2016 by Guest Blogger in Boat Tours , Icebergs , Kayaking , Whale Watching , Gros Morne National Park , Torngat Mountains National Park , Lighthouses , Cultural Experiences , Fogo & Change Islands , Ferryland , L'Anse aux Meadows , St. John's and Twillingate
This isn't the type of place where you'll struggle to find an adventure. The Canadian Signatures Experiences collection is here to point you in the right direction.
26 Feb 2016 by Guest Blogger in Icebergs
Around here, icebergs come in all shapes and sizes, travelling along Iceberg Alley to fill the bay, or your glass.
10 Feb 2016 by Rory Lambert in Culture
My Nan spent her whole life knitting and crocheting and, at one point, had knit my father a beautiful pair of wool mitts. This pair of handmade hand-warmers were given from my Nan to her youngest son, made with care and woven with intricate patterns. They were more than just mittens or gloves; they were works of art in their own right.
5 Feb 2016 by Guest Blogger in Hiking & Walking
In these parts, a walk in the woods is just the beginning of your adventure. Our 29,000 kilometres of pristine coastline, set against a backdrop of natural wonder, provides plenty of distractions along the way.
13 Jan 2016 by Dave Sullivan in Geography
A couple of colourful tales about the wonderful places here. To get the full scoop you've got to come and see it all for yourself.
14 Apr 2015 by Dave Sullivan in Hiking & Walking , Nature , Parks , Trip Planning , Gros Morne National Park , Bonavista and Outdoor Adventure
I love hiking. It's a new discovery for me. In the past year I've been on quite a health kick and hiking has been a major part of that.
14 Apr 2015 by Dave Sullivan in Nature , Culture , Trip Planning , Cultural Experiences , Museum and Weather
As much as we'd like to tell you that it's sunshine and lollipops each and every day of the year – we can't. Sometimes (not all the time), it can rain.
6 Oct 2014 by Amy Fisher in Birdwatching and Hiking & Walking
The fall is a great time of year for hiking in Newfoundland & Labrador. From breathing in the crisp fall air to enjoying the bright yellow, red, and orange colours to picking berries along the coastline, it's no wonder the fall hike is a favourite for many. To help get you underway, we've pulled together a list of 5 great fall hikes in Newfoundland & Labrador.
6 Oct 2014 by Keith and Heather Nicol in Humber Valley and Outdoor Adventure
Every fall several cruise ship itineraries include Corner Brook as a port of call so that passengers can see the fall splendor in Newfoundland. These cruise ships often travel between Quebec City and Boston and make several stops so that passengers can see the best fall colours in each province or state. And generally Corner Brook is their main stop in Newfoundland since this part of the province has scenic fall colours. But you don't have to take an expensive cruise ship to Newfoundland to see this autumn brilliance. You can simply board a Marine Atlantic ferry from North Sidney to Port aux Basques and then drive north for 2.5 hours to Corner Brook and the Humber Valley. Here you can easily create your own itinerary and depending on your interest you can explore by car, foot , bicycle and even by kayak.
1 Oct 2014 by Amy Fisher in Hiking & Walking and Trip Planning
Thinking of going for a day hike on one of Newfoundland & Labrador's 200 hiking and walking trails? Before you do, check out this list of hikers' tips and checklist items to help you prepare for your trip.
24 Sep 2014 by Keith and Heather Nicol in Entertainment
This year the Glynmill Inn celebrates 90 years in the hospitality business catering to both local Corner Brook residents and visitors alike with its old world charm. The Glynmill Inn was built in a distinctive tudor style and currently includes 78 hotel rooms, 2 restaurants, meeting rooms and other amenities. It was designed by architect, Andrew Cobb of Halifax in 1923 and was turned into a hotel a year later.
17 Sep 2014 by Keith and Heather Nicol in Golfing
Fall in the Humber Valley of Western Newfoundland means brilliant autumn colours and where better to enjoy these than on Newfoundland's top rated golf course at Humber Valley Resort. When we walked into the pro shop on Tuesday, September 16 we met the Managing Director of Operations, Gary Oke who told us that despite the slow start to the season, that they had had a great season so far. " One of our big new accolades is that Score Golf Magazine ranked us as number 16 in Canada up from number 32 last year. There is no other course in Newfoundland with that kind of ranking which suggests that we have a great product here" he told us before our round.
5 Sep 2014 by Keith and Heather Nicol in Gros Morne National Park and Cultural Experiences
"Tempting Providence" has been running for 12 years and has become one of the favourite plays at the Gros Morne Theatre Festival (GMTF) in Cow Head. It has toured internationally and has been performed over 650 times! This summer it has again played to sold out crowds but you still have a chance to see it this September. We recently saw the play on September 2 for our 4th time and it is still just as powerful as the first time we saw it 9 years ago. "Tempting Providence" is the true story of nurse Bennett who was dedicated to serving the health care needs along Newfoundland's rugged Northern Peninsula for over 50 years beginning in 1921.


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Topic: This Website has been a huge help!
Dear Stacie-
Just wanted to let you know that this website is a huge help in dealing with my cancer as I'm sure it is to so many others.
So today on Thanksgiving, I'm counting this as one of my blessings.
Thank you so much Stacie and Rick for this website.
Praying for us all,
Caroline Stoufer


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Learn2Serve Food Safety Manager Principles Training + Food Manager Exam
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vfxy Photoblogs - Softcover
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Over the years, vfxy Photoblogs has grown to become one of the largest photoblogging syndication sites on the Internet. Fueled by the creative drive of thousands of members and a range of talented designers and programmers, the site has quickly matured beyond our wildest dreams. Four years after we began the site, we have published our first book which marks the first attempt in history to transfer a collection of photoblogs into print. It also acts as historical documentation, a hard-copy rendering of art that is contained in the primarily digital realm of photoblogging.
In Volume I, we included 30 amazing photobloggers. You will find before and after images, explanations about their work-flow and how they got to be involved with photoblogging. We also included our website's "Weekly Pic-k" review for each artist written by Dawn. Own a piece of photoblogging history, buy this book today! 100% of the profit from the book's sale will go to support photoblogging community!
Características y detalles
- Categoría Fotografía artística
Apaisado estándar, 25×20 cm
66 Páginas
- Fecha de publicación abr. 08, 2009
- Etiquetas photography, art, vfxy, photographers, collection, photo, photoblogging, blogging, blog, images, photos, photoblogs, photoblog
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Immigrants drink and eat at Tarifa's harbour after being rescued off the Spanish coast. Spanish lifeguards today saved 32 African immigrants trying to cross the sea from Morocco to Spain in flimsy vessels, authorities said.
© The Financial Times Ltd 2016 FT and 'Financial Times' are trademarks of The Financial Times Ltd.


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My conlang in progress, Experimental Conlang A (viewtopic.php?f=11&t=604), is currently written predominantly phonemically. I have not yet attempted to work out the phonetic manifestation of the phonemes, except for a few cases of assimilation and epenthesis, because my attempts to pronounce can only be described as with a terrible American accent.
If anyone would be willing to post how they read Experimental Conlang A as I continue to add to it, it would be most appreciated.
Experimental Conlang A: Observational Phonetics
The place to discuss your conlangs and conlanging.
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General Hardware Want to talk about anything Hardware related? This is the place, you can discuss it here.
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In the most recent post, I discussed the fullest analysis yet by Hans-Werner Sinn (together with Timo Wollmershäuser), president of the Ifo Institute in Munich, of the role of the European System of Central Banks in funding the balance of payments imbalances inside the eurozone.
While this post elicited many interesting comments, none, I believe, invalidated Professor Sinn's basic thesis, which is that monetary financing of the balance of payments (ie the current account deficit, plus net private capital flows) is large, growing and decisive in sustaining imbalances inside the eurozone.
Prof Sinn's work has attracted much controversy. But this is not, in my view, because it is fundamentally wrong (although I think he did initially exaggerate the problems created for managing money and credit in Germany itself), but because it reveals what many policymakers and observers would like to conceal. Read more


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BLOOMFIELD TOWNSHIP, Mich. - Bloomfield Township police said they busted a guy driving his riding lawnmower drunk down the sidewalk after leaving a drug store.
On March 22, while on routine patrol in the area of Woodward and Square Lake, police said officers noticed a riding lawnmower stopped in the parking lot of the Rite Aid.
Police said the officers watched as 47-year-old Roy Walton exited the store, got on the lawn mower and drove it down the sidewalk.
When officers stopped Walton, they discovered he had been drinking.
He was arrested and charged with felony operating while intoxicated.
He has prior convictions for the same offense.
He has posted a $25,000 personal bond.
The lawnmower was impounded.


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The 6th Devizes Scout group has thanked staff and governors at The Trinity Primary School at Quakers Walk for allowing them a home base in the school hall.
Scout leader Scott Coleman said of their first meeting: "We had our first night of the term together at our new home, The Trinity School. The headteacher, has very kindly agreed to let us use their hall for a very good rate, also allowing us to use some of their equipment.
"The evening was a group event with the Beavers, Cubs and newly-formed Scout troop all together.
"We were joined by Keith Bennett, our District Commissioner, Jane Palmer, our Assistant County Commissioner for Cubs, Sharon Cottrell and Brian Hoggett, who are both members of Scout Active Support and have been a fantastic support to the group.
"Several parents also stayed with us and very kindly gave their time to help get drinks ready and other useful background tasks.
"Other parents joined us halfway through the evening because it was going to hold a special memory for their children, as they got invested into a mix of Beavers, Cubs and Scouts."


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Top 10 Plays in Super Bowl History
Plenty of big time players never made a big time play in the Super Bowl. For some players, their career might be a blip in the NFL history books, if not for a super play in the Super Bowl. Just ask David Tyree. For stars, a great Super Bowl play is a top highlight on an already impressive football resume.


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Cancer.Net Specialty Editor: Childhood Cancers
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, TN
Alberto Pappo, MD, is the Director of the Solid Tumor Division at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Dr. Pappo earned his medical degree from Universidad Anahuac in Mexico City. After his residency at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, Texas, Dr. Pappo went on to complete his fellowship at the Children's Medical Center of Dallas and The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas in Dallas, Texas. Dr. Pappo's research interests are in the development of novel therapies for pediatric solid tumors with a special interest in pediatric melanoma, soft tissue sarcomas, and pediatric gastrointestinal stromal tumors.
Disclosure: In the past 2 years, Dr. Pappo has served as a consultant/advisor to ZIOPHARM Oncology.
Last updated: September 17, 2014


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Some Thoughts on Bridging the Gap Between Nurse and Direct-Entry Midwives
by Robbie Davis-Floyd
© 1999 Midwifery Today, Inc. All rights reserved.
[Editor's note: This article first appeared in Midwifery Today Issue 49, Spring 1999.]
Photo by Patti Ramos
For the past five years or so I have listened with dismay to direct-entry midwives criticizing nurse midwives as "medwives" and "physician extenders" and to nurse midwives talking about professional direct-entry midwives as if they don't know very much, and working in some states to pass exclusionary laws.
Such behavior is a classic feature of oppressed groups who turn on each other instead of concentrating on fighting their oppressors. An oppressed group will tend to want to fight its battle for identity and survival against members of other, often similar, groups. The group that is closer to full cultural integration will want to protect that position, jealously guarding its hard-won toehold in the technocracy, while the more marginalized group will tend to regard the more integrated group as a bunch of traitors who have compromised their ideals and values to get into the system. Both attitudes are exclusionary, and both are counterproductive, because they work to keep apart people with common interests who could benefit from working together in their struggle against the larger system.
For the past several years I have been actively conducting research on midwifery education and politics in the United States and Mexico. I have interviewed more than one hundred practicing midwives of all types, and sixty students (thirty direct-entry students and thirty nurse midwifery students) about their views on midwifery education and on the relationships between nurse and direct-entry midwives.(1) Some of them expressed strong prejudices against the other group, while others expressed positive feelings of respect and mutual goodwill.
I found first that most midwives who expressed negative opinions about "that other kind of midwife" had very little or no personal or professional exposure to those other midwives, but rather were forming opinions based on stereotypes or the opinions of others; and second, that every midwife who had positive opinions about "the other kind" of midwife did have direct exposure to those other midwives, personally and professionally, either through watching them practice or through time spent together in monthly potluck dinners, joint conferences, and the like. In this short article, I will share with you just a few examples of how such direct exposure can lead to members of each group forming a positive view of the other.
A CNM from Virginia told me that she had worked as a labor and delivery nurse in a state where only nurse midwives were legal, and then as a brand new nurse midwife had moved to another state where the situation was the same. She said:
"In both states, the Board of Nursing has been very aggressive about litigation against lay midwives who had adverse outcomes. So I'd never met a lay midwife in all these years and the only things I knew were negative things. . . . Then when I was just out of school two lay midwives transferred a patient into our hospital. This lady was a para 7 and had been stuck at 9 centimeters for a number of hours. . . . I think that during the transport somehow the baby had gotten itself into the right position for birth. I certainly didn't do anything special to help this mother birth, but when she got there the baby was ready to be born. The two lay midwives-the senior midwife and her apprentice-were not allowed to actually lay hands on the mother, but they stayed there and they talked to me and they guided me.
"I was so impressed because these women had a wealth of knowledge. They knew so much more than I knew, or than I had ever been taught in my CNM training. I delivered the baby. It was eleven pounds and four ounces. The delivery was a bit difficult and they helped with it . . . . Afterward, the senior midwife came up to me and she said, 'You know, that was a truly beautiful delivery and may I give you a hug as a sister midwife?' It totally turned around my head. I saw the wealth of knowledge these women had-they described all the things they had done with positioning and herbs and relaxation, different things they had done to help this mother. They truly knew birth, they just knew it instinctively somehow, much better than I did, and better, I think, than any of my instructors, and I had such respect for them. And I came to realize that we're all just sisters in this one profession, all with the same goals for women."
Licensed midwife Beth Coyote had a similar revelation as a result of spending time with nurse midwives. She said:
"I did a workshop for the Highline nurse midwives (they work in a community hospital, serving a lot of indigent folks) on self-care. I sat with them and we watched videos and did guided meditations. . . . I got to know them and they're just like me. I don't know why I didn't know that. They have the same heart and soul in midwifery and they are able to be with women who otherwise would have no midwifery care."
Sally Avenson, a CNM practicing in Seattle, found her opinions of direct-entry midwives transformed both through watching them work and through taking one of them as her student. In 1974, she was working as the head labor and delivery nurse in the university hospital in Seattle, where the lay midwives in the area were starting to bring their transports. She said:
"It only took one or two interactions with their clients for me to be extremely intrigued. Here I thought I knew everything about babies and how they came out and what happened, and I realized that I had been working in a real closed tunnel there at the hospital, in sort of a Mecca of intervention and of 'good care' and I saw these midwives come in with these women and the relationship was what hit me-the strength of the ties between the woman, her support person, and the midwife, but particularly between the woman and the midwife-this gentle but strong relationship. And I just thought, 'Oh, this is important. This should be part of what happens.' And I realized how dedicated these midwives were and what a completely different view they had of the birth process.
"You know, I'm really grateful to those women because they opened up my horizons to the diversity of birth. I think it's very easy for people to get elitist and think there's 'one way,' and it's the way you see when you first start, wherever you start. Too many people get trapped into cutting their teeth somewhere and then not chewing and nibbling other things. . . . People think what they do is right, it's the 'rightest,' and anything else is suspect. Black and white. Negotiation is not something we do well as healthcare providers. We all want to be right all the time, and we don't want anybody to tell us that there's another way to do it."
In the ensuing years, Sally took training as a CNM. Once in active practice, she agreed to serve as preceptor for a direct-entry student from Seattle Midwifery School. It was an enlightening process for them both, as Sally describes:
"When I first said I'd take a student from SMS, I was very nervous, and the first student I had scared the living daylights out of me. I found out she had trained with (a certain midwife) in (Texas), and I thought, 'Oh, no. She's going to try to do all sorts of crazy things.' She was a pretty wild-looking person and I thought, 'Will my clients think this person is not conventional enough?' It turns out she also balked at being assigned to me and told the school she couldn't work with this 'conservative nurse midwife.'
"But we made a go for it and I tell you, we each learned a lot about different ways of doing the same thing, and being safe and being different but still okay. I watched her deliver one of my clients with a shoulder dystocia and I had never seen anybody do what she did. And it was wonderful. And it was what she had learned with (that particular midwife), and it wasn't in any of the books, but it worked . . . . she did a beautiful job with a ten-and-a-half pound baby that was pretty stuck. The woman had been lying down and she just popped her up into a squat, and basically she went in and turned the baby, but it wasn't the way I'd seen physicians do it. And it was so gentle, but effective. You know, that kind of maneuver where afterwards you realize your muscles are sore from the intensity. . . . To push just hard enough, but not too hard-it's the right placement of your hand as much as what you're doing with it. And she did it so well. After having had such a good experience with her, I worked with SMS students for years. I enjoyed being their preceptor because . . . they could help me and I could help them."
Karen Hays was a licensed midwife in Washington state who later became a nurse midwife as well. I was particularly interested to hear what she would have to say, since her experience of both groups was an intensely personal and fully embodied one! I asked her if she thought that one type of training was superior to the other, and she answered, "No. Not at all. I think it's very individual. I think your philosophy, your intelligence, and your compassion are often more the determiners than the training."
As an anthropologist, I ask my readers to remember that in the United States, midwives are the only caregivers who keep open the full spectrum of choice for birthing women in hospitals, in freestanding birth centers, and at home. Midwives must go where the mothers are, and that includes the mothers who give birth in hospitals where most direct-entry midwives cannot go, as well as the mothers who choose homebirth whom most nurse midwives cannot serve.(2) So that we can honor all kinds of mothers, let us also honor the midwives who offer them all kinds of choices:
Building bridges between our divisions
I reach out to you, won't you reach out to me?
With all of our voices and all of our visions
Sisters, we can make such a sweet harmony!
- Some of the results of that research appear in "The Ups, Downs, and Interlinkages of Nurse- and Direct-Entry Midwifery: Status, Practice, and Education," and in "Types of Midwifery Training: An Anthropological Overview." Both articles are published in Paths to Becoming a Midwife: Getting an Education, edited by Jan Tritten and Joel Southern. Eugene, Oregon: Midwifery Today, 1998. I refer my readers to those two chapters for more in-depth discussion of these important issues.
- Out of the nearly 8,000 members of the American College of Nurse Midwives, fewer than 200 attend homebirths. Many more would like to, but are unable to obtain the required physician supervision and/or malpractice insurance.
Robbie Davis-Floyd, Ph.D., is a Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. Click here for complete biography.
If you enjoyed this article, you'll enjoy Midwifery Today magazine! Subscribe now!