Game speed tweaks: S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Supreme Commander and Oblivion

Get intimate with the big three PC games of today, tweaking their consoles and configs.

Keeping up with the pace of new CPUs and video cards can be demanding on both the soul and wallet, but, if you want to truly enjoy a game at its greatest, the top hardware has to be there.

Or so one might think.

It’s a well known fact among the enthusiast gaming community that all games come pre-configured to be as compatible as possible, as the developer has no guarantees as to what systems its game will end up on. This is mostly a good thing, as it means there’s a high chance the game will just work when you load it. What makes it bad is that this high compatibility comes at the expense of speed, visuals and sometimes playability.

There’s no way you’d run Windows, Linux, OpenBSD, Mac OS X or any other operating system (or hardware with overclocking headroom for that matter) stock, so why should the games you play be spared a bit of tweaking? The answer is they shouldn’t, and we’re here to show you how to get today’s top three games – S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadows of Chernobyl, Supreme Commander and Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion – running at their best.

Of patches, drivers and hardware
Before we start looking at the games individually, there’s a few things you can do across the board to improve your gaming performance. The first of these is to download the latest patch for the game in question. Along with bug fixes and new features, most updates include improvements to hard-coded systems such as the graphics engine or AI. In the next few pages, we’ll quickly detail the fastest way to get the latest updates for each game.

The second step is to install the newest drivers for your motherboard, video card and operating system. Although performance gains from drivers are usually nothing to write home about, or even fire a quick email over, every little bit counts. Drivers are more for stability and compatibility than anything else, and can remove problems such as graphical artefacts and the like.

Obviously the best upgrade you can make is via hardware, but this should be your last resort – unless you have a giant, Scrooge McDuck-like vault filled with coins that you’re tired of swimming through. If you do decide to dip into that dusty barren wasteland you call a wallet and careful fish out a crusty tenner or two, be sure to take note of the following recommendations:

1 If your games take a long time to load, or you find that you have a smooth frame rate until you enter large environments filled with lots of players/textures, then you should look to buy either more RAM, or a video card with more RAM. These days we recommend at least 2GB of system RAM and 512MB of video RAM to play games such as Oblivion at their shiniest.

2 If you game plays fine until you head into an open environment with lots of textures, where it seems to chug at a consistent speed, then you’ll definitely want to look into a video card with more RAM – at least 512MB.

3 If you find your game chugs, no matter the resolution or texture detail, then your CPU is at fault. Try to grab something with at least two cores (purchasing a single core processor should actually be a bit difficult these days) and branded ‘Core 2 Duo’, as Intel continues to hand AMD its derriere.

Alternatively, if it plays fine until you really bump up the texture detail and resolution, you may just need an up-to-date graphics card. Again, something with 512MB is the way to go, and if you can manage it, an Radeon 2x00 or GeForce 8x00 series board is recommended for DirectX 10-compatability (once the games finally arrive).

With these basics covered, let’s move onto the games.