Play Oblivion on your GeForce 3

Author: Tim Smalley
Published: 25th April 2006

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion still looks stunning on a GeForce 3.

A group of Elder Scrolls fanatics are in the process of making a patch for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion to enable support for cards below the games' recommended minimum system specifications.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion requires a DirectX 9.0 compatible video card - the full list of supported cards can be found here. If you've not got a GeForce FX 5600 or Radeon 9500 in your system, you're out of luck. Until now, that is.

The cunningly named Oldblivion attaches to Oblivion and applies some patches to the game to make it run on older hardware. These patches change the shaders used by Oblivion from SM2.0 to SM1.1, along with ensuring that Oblivion doesn't crash when its run on hardware that doesn't have support for SM2.0 instruction sets.

Changing the shaders from SM2.0 to SM1.1 opens up support for a wide range of older hardware, dating right back to the GeForce 3 and Radeon 8500 series video cards.

There are some screenshots showing the game running on an AMD Athlon running at 1.5GHz with 512MB of memory and an NVIDIA GeForce 3. We hope to have a look at how Oldblivion runs on retro hardware in the near future.

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