Do you play with grass distance set to "0"?

[GuySan]

It just seems more nostalgic to me, like Morrowind. I can also see those damn wolves when they attack me

[Damon]

I play with it at zero when I am not doing my LP, in that, I have all the settings maxed.

[H8Ball]

I used to have grass disabled because, in 2006, I had an old 32-bit single-core PC with a 128Mb GeforceFX 5900XT AGP 8x video card. This had VERY slow SM2.0 shaders so grass reduced framerates to about 1fps. Totally unplayable slideshow! The only solution was to disable grass and, even then, I was lucky if I got 10fps. In fact, I eventually shelved Oblivion until I could afford a better video card.

In 2009, I finally bought a 512Mb Geforce 7900GS AGP 8x card (SM3.0 shaders about 6x faster than the 5900XT). I could finally enable the grass, HDR and everything else! Mind you, I still had to tweak the heck out of Oblivion.ini and install mesh optimisation mods to get a reasonable balance between eye candy and performance (averaging around 20fps).

Last year (September), I finally upgraded to a 64-bit quad-core PC with a 1Gb Geforce GTX 560 PCI-E x16 card. I can now finally run Oblivion totally maxed out at decent framerates (averaging around 50fps), and with the grass distance tweaked beyond maximum!

Default settings in Oblivion.ini (with Grass Distance slider at 100%) are fGrassStartFadeDistance=7000.0 and fGrassEndDistance=8000.0. Mine are now tweaked UP to 10000 and 14000, which greatly increases the distance and quadruples the fade-out range making the fading FAR less obvious, with NO noticeable slowdown. Only snag is if I ever use the in-game Video Options, they'll reset to 7000 and 8000 (hard-coded defaults) and I have to re-edit Oblivion.ini to tweak them again. Fortunately, once Video Options are set up, you don't need to touch them again.

[whoman69]

I have an older computer, set grass at 0 is a must. I have to buy a new one before I can buy Skyrim.

[OblivionDuruza]

Its' funny that you mention the nostalgia factor of playing without grass, because when I installed Morroblivion for the first time, one of the first things I noticed was that I hated the grass, so I disabled it for a while. I don't think I could ever love Oblivion more without grass, it'd seem unnatural, but for Morroblivion, it's certainly something I'd consider.

[H8Ball]

The grass doesn't look "natural" anyway, more like some "landscape garden designer" stuck lots of identical artificial plastic grass clumps all over the place. Many of them don't even match the ground textures very closely at all, so they look completely out of place. Bright yellow/green grass on dark green ground, for example.

Having said that, it's nice to have the "realism" of hunting in the grass for a lost item. Although if I get too frustrated, it's console open and TG (ToggleGrass) so I can find it.

Tip: DON'T drop round objects outside! They roll merrily down the slightest slope and goodness knows where they end up! Potion bottles are especially difficult to find because their shape means they tend to roll in unpredictable paths. Bethesda obviously made potion bottles pink so they'd be easier to see but, even with the grass disabled, it can still be a nightmare finding them.

[Black Thunder]

I have it on 0. Because I can get High texture quality on bloom with 4x anti-aliasing on my NVidia GeForce 8500.

[Evil-i]

Tip: DON'T drop round objects outside! They roll merrily down the slightest slope and goodness knows where they end up! Potion bottles are especially difficult to find because their shape means they tend to roll in unpredictable paths. Bethesda obviously made potion bottles pink so they'd be easier to see but, even with the grass disabled, it can still be a nightmare finding them.

If you're on a moderate to steep slope, roundness is the least of your worries. I've probably used up more sandal leather by chasing Glow Dust downhill than by doing anything else. Oblivion's soil obviously contains an unusually high amount of buttered Teflon, and the same can said of Skyrim. Dead Bandits, Bears and Wolves body-surfing the downhill cobbles is something of a Skyrim necrosport of increasing commonality and popularity.

[H8Ball]

One of my favourite mini-games (just for laughs) is "Bear Rolling". They're fairly round-bodied, so heaving them down mountainsides just to see how far they'll roll is fun.

Yeah. I agree about the Glow Dust. I've chased quite a few of those yellow spangles all over the place. They seem to take off like a bat out of hell on the slightest slope. Imagine the scene, a wandering snake-oil Merchant selling frying pans. "Yes ladies! The new completely non-stick steel skillet enamelled with a secret formulation containing finely ground Glow Dust. Just the thing for your kitchen. Watch as I cook a Venison steak with ease... See, it's totally non-stick. Means you can toss it like a pancake..." <flicks pan and hot steak flies out, skids 50 yards along the ground and up an unsuspecting Guard's greaves> "Ow! That's assault! Stop, criminal scum!"

And yes, Glow Dust often gets lost in the grass too. Obviously why Bethesda made it bright canary yellow.

[Grollothe]

I had some trouble with the framerate (fps) and tried various ways to increase it. Then i found
LowPoly_Grass_for_SI_v15
that makes the grass take up less memory, thus increasing fps. It looks good too.
A nice little solution for my Laptop.

John

[H8Ball]

Even with my new quad-core 64-bit PC with Geforce GTX 560 video card (well, not exactly new, I've had it for nearly 6 months now), I still find framerates dropping below 30fps from time to time. Then again, I have RAEVWD and all the Unique Landscapes mods installed, so it's understandable. But I also still need optimisation mods installed too (Operation Optimisation for mesh reductions, Low Poly Grass, Low Poly Trees, and a lot of other meshes PyFFI'ed to reduce their complexity). Goes to show how poorly optimised Oblivion's meshes (3D models) are.

The good thing is that with all the optimisations installed, I get decent framerates. They never drop below 20fps, and certainly never below 10fps (slideshow territory). It's only taken 6 years of frustration, extensive optimisation and tweaking, three RAM upgrades, two video card upgrades and finally buying a modern PC WAY beyond the original recommended spec to finally get a game worth playing without it devolving into a slideshow.

At least it now runs like a four-legged dog with a limp instead of the one-legged dog with a broken leg it used to be. So I can say that all the upgrades have given the dog three bionic legs, one of them with a knee joint that needs oiling.

Is gaming an expensive habit? Er... YES!