April DX9 SDK - get it

#1 Thanks for the heads up!

#2 Wow! Oblivion, which was playing like a dog even with a dual SLI rig and dual core processor is now working just fine. Still crashes every 5 minutes, but what the hell, the frame rate is good :-)

#3 What kind of crash?

#4 I suppose this is wayyy off topic for this forum, but I'll sneak in a quickie and hope I get away with it for past good behaviour :-)

Basically if I play for between 5 and 30 minutes, then someone chucks a spell at me, the game goes bang. Nearly always if I am behind a balcony balustrade, or a window opening above a lower level in a daedra shrine. Also when outside and partially hidden by a rock or something.

I guess there is some sort of collision problem in the spell system, but it is also related to game play time. Beacause reloading the game from a save and letting the NPC cast the spell at me again causes no problems. Only if it's been running for several minutes or more.

Dave.

#5 Uhm Dave, perhaps I'm missing something obvious here - but this is a SDK release. So unless you got the source to Oblivion, you won't see any difference.

#6 Hi,

There were supposedly a bunch of algorithm changes in the update. I would assume this would make the runtime behaviour more efficient? If not, then my previous directx install must have been screwed or running the debug version.

All I can say is that after the install, all of the glitches have gone away (apart from the crashes). Without the slightest doubt, Oblivion now runs far better than it did before. It used to be painful, with a halt after every step in the deep forests. Now I can run through them like some demented nature lover, with no problems. I've changed nothing else on the machine.

Just FYI, the difference is far too great to be a perception thing, believe me. It's like a different game.

Dave.

#7 The SDK is not used by the runtime installation.

Unless the Oblivion team updated their binary with the new SDK and you downloaded their patch, there won't be any difference if you install the SDK. You need to recompile the binary for it to take effect.

#8 DX is mostly a DLL called via Interfaces. They may have changed the implementation in the DLL's which could be done without recompiling. As long as they dont change their interfaces its perfectly legal to do that.

But if they added anything speed related to this version it isnt shown on the official page

#9 Yeah I think Dave is imagining things :) Oblivion has yet to be patched, too!

Oblivion is all over the place performance wise. In Leyawiin I get 1-8 FPS, even in buildings (no idea), but then compare that to some interior areas where my FPS is over 50 no matter what is going on, unless of course 4+ things are on my screen at once. Even then, its not as bad as staring at a wall in a building in Leyawiin.

#10 Yeah I think Dave is imagining things :) Oblivion has yet to be patched, too!

Oblivion is all over the place performance wise. In Leyawiin I get 1-8 FPS, even in buildings (no idea), but then compare that to some interior areas where my FPS is over 50 no matter what is going on, unless of course 4+ things are on my screen at once. Even then, its not as bad as staring at a wall in a building in Leyawiin.

Edit: though it looks like there are April runtimes as well, so maybe...

#11 Oh well, I don't care, whatever happened with the install I'm a lot happier now. If I'm living in cloud cuckoo land at least I'm happy there :-) Oblivion works now and it didn't before!

#12 That's awesome. Do I need to uninstall the previous version of the DirectX SDK?

#13 No, just need to update your include directories in your compiler, but you really don't need the older version anymore.

#14 Installing the SDK also usually installs the latest binaries, or atleast gives you the option. If you didn't already have the latest binaries, it could have made a difference. Or if you previously had the debug binaries installed, and installed the release version this time, it would make a difference.