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Tweakguides did that: http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_4.html

Also, the entire article is worth noting: http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html

Basically, when they crunched the numbers, they found that the determining factor for whether a game sees large-scale piracy was popularity. For the popular games, the piracy rate came out at around 1 pirate copy for every six copies sold for the consoles, and 10-12 pirate copies for every legitimate copy sold for the PC.

Tweakguides did that: http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_4.html

Also, the entire article is worth noting: http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html

Basically, when they crunched the numbers, they found that the determining factor for whether a game sees large-scale piracy was popularity. For the popular games, the piracy rate came out at around 1 pirate copy for every six copies sold for the consoles, and 10-12 pirate copies for every legitimate copy sold for the PC.

As I mentioned in another reply, Tweakguides did some research on this, and crunched the numbers. The article (which is long, but worth reading), is here: http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html

To answer your question, they found that the DRM only had a negative impact on piracy, and that was when it was successful. Lack of DRM (or light DRM) showed absolutely no impact on piracy rates whatsoever. So, either the people who are pirating to get away from DRM are an insignificant minority, or it's just an excuse.

Now, with PC game piracy at a rate of around 10 to 12 pirate downloads per copy sold (both download and disc), the highest percentage of illegal downloads that can be accounted for by people downloading pirate copies to circumvent the DRM on copies they bought is 10% (1/10), and that's assuming that no copies sold match up with a pirate copy downloaded first (eg. somebody downloads the game, tries it, and decides to buy it). So that's a basic rough estimate based on the numbers I've got.

Tweakguides did some research on this, and crunched the numbers. The article (which is very long, but very worth reading), is here: http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html

As far as methodology goes, I think that's covered here: http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_4.html

But, in brief, for the console market, the numbers for a popular game (they used Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2) in the console market was 1 pirated copy for every six copies sold. For the PC game market over the same period, it was 10 to 12 pirated copies downloaded for every legitimate copy sold (both download and CD/DVD).

Loss is a bit more complicated, but measurable. The most measurable part is the freeloader effect - pirate copies using authentication servers and technical support (and some of the supporting data is the number of copies authenticating on the servers vs. numbers sold, which can be over 10:1 at times), and that's costs of time, server bandwidth, etc.

As far as lost sales, that requires an understanding of the game market. You have hard core fans, who will buy the game no matter what - that's a small core of guaranteed sales. You have hardcore pirates, who will never pay for the game, so there's no point in even trying to market to them. The lost sales take place in a third group - call them "casual gamers." This group is interested in playing the game, but they aren't particular on how they get it. So, if they can't download it, they'll buy it. Most of the sales for a game tend to be in this third group. So, the longer the piracy can be held off, the more sales occur in this group. Zero day piracy wipes any sales from this group off the map.

Now, again, this makes it very difficult to measure exact numbers of lost sales, but you can get a sense through trends. So, if a game had 400,000 sales with piracy held off for two weeks, and the sequel to that game had 50,000 sales with zero-day piracy, you can draw some general conclusions about lost sales, as well as the sizes of the various market groups.

Tweakguides did some research on this, and crunched the numbers. The article (which is very long, but very worth reading), is here: http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html

As far as methodology goes, I think that's covered here: http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_4.html

But, in brief, for the console market, the numbers for a popular game (they used Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2) in the console market was 1 pirated copy for every six copies sold. For the PC game market over the same period, it was 10 to 12 pirated copies downloaded for every legitimate copy sold (both download and CD/DVD).

Loss is a bit more complicated, but measurable. The most measurable part is the freeloader effect - pirate copies using authentication servers and technical support (and some of the supporting data is the number of copies authenticating on the servers vs. numbers sold, which can be over 10:1 at times), and that's costs of time, server bandwidth, etc.

As far as lost sales, that requires an understanding of the game market. You have hard core fans, who will buy the game no matter what - that's a small core of guaranteed sales. You have hardcore pirates, who will never pay for the game, so there's no point in even trying to market to them. The lost sales take place in a third group - call them "casual gamers." This group is interested in playing the game, but they aren't particular on how they get it. So, if they can't download it, they'll buy it. Most of the sales for a game tend to be in this third group. So, the longer the piracy can be held off, the more sales occur in this group. Zero day piracy wipes any sales from this group off the map.

Now, again, this makes it very difficult to measure exact numbers of lost sales, but you can get a sense through trends. So, if a game had 400,000 sales with piracy held off for two weeks, and the sequel to that game had 50,000 sales with zero-day piracy, you can draw some general conclusions about lost sales, as well as the sizes of the various market groups.

Yes on the guy wires, but the critical part is when they do start being within the realm of resolvable by your vision they don't come through as a single row of partially missing pixels, rather they appear to fade into view. This is kind of what SS does in this example (look specifically at the TV antenna on the building on the left.

I do agree though the ultimate solution is simply to scale the DPI to incredible levels which is what should happen on mobile devices (we have the technology a certain company has proven that already). Proper AA however comes in very nicely in the desktop market where I could neither a) buy a 27" screen from NEC with a resolution greater than 1920x1200, nor b) afford a screen with a greater resolution. This fake AA is just garbage in between, and possibly provides a reason to not innovate in higher resolutions.

That it might have some minimal effect on slowing illegal copying of games is just an added bonus at this point.

I think that you're underestimating the value of slowing down illegal copying. This long article (paginated, unfortunately) explores piracy on the PC and among other things shows that just slowing down piracy by as little as a couple weeks can greatly increase a publisher's income. An example given in the article is Bioshock, which went uncracked for 13 days. Although there was a PR hit for employing some draconian DRM, commercially the delay was successful. In contrast, if a PC game can pirated either before release or with a day or so, then sales take an especially nasty hit.

As much as I loathe DRM, the article makes it clear that it's completely uneconomical for publishers to allow illegal copying immediately following the release of the game. I think that a good compromise would be something like ransomware. Initially the game would be released with nasty DRM. Once the game hits various sales thresholds then the DRM is rolled back or eliminated entirely. If the sales thresholds are never reached then perhaps the DRM is eliminated anyways after a couple years. In this way publishers could be ensured some profit if the game is good enough and gamers wouldn't have to be treated like criminals. Look at the Humble Indie Games Bundle as an example. They set clear targets and raised so much money that the companies released the source of their games.

Have you played any of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games? Unlike Fallout 3, they're more towards the FPS end of the spectrum rather than RPG, but they're also a lot more realistic than the wacky 50s sci-fi feel of the Fallout games and a hell of a lot more bleak. GSC Game World is based in Kiev and they've made multiple trips into the exclusion zone, the maps and the layout of places like Pripyat and the entire Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant are very faithfully reproduced in-game, they did an amazing job.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_RDiKxVBLJZo/SxIu6zDfuFI/AAAAAAAAANE/lnC7nXgLZxs/s1600/stalker-Shadow-of-Chernobyl_03.jpg
http://www.legitreviews.com/images/reviews/490/stalker.jpg
http://www.tweakguides.com/images/STALKER_13.jpg

I think they capture the atmosphere really well, the environment is feral and hostile and you really have to be on the lookout for radiation and anomalies. Shadow Of Chernobyl was the first game, the prequel Clear Sky was a bit of a letdown, but Call Of Pripyat is by far one of the best and most atmospheric games I've ever played.

http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html

A lot of gaming houses are moving away from PC as their primary platform for single player games as a direct consequence of piracy on the PC. Yes, there is pirated stuff for consoles as well but apparently not enough to hurt sales as much. And yes, PC versions of games are still going to be available. The thing is that the games are going to be designed first and foremost for consoles and more casual(read braindead) type of gaming.

I'm sorry, but I wasn't very impressed with this article.

First of all, it starts by misrepresenting the "lost sales" argument. The piracy argument isn't that every pirated copy is a lost sale - it's that the piracy rate represents a significant number of lost sales. In essence, you can divide the market into hard-core (those who will buy the game no matter what) and a much larger casual market. The piracy takes a chunk out of the casual market, where if people can download a game instead of buying it, they will. And, it's not a 1:1 ratio of pirated copy to lost sale, but, besides there being an argument to be made that the game would not have been downloaded if there wasn't at least SOME interest, the sooner the protection is cracked, the more people who would have bought the game otherwise will have just downloaded it.

Second, the article completely ignores using authentication servers to track the percentage of games being played that are legitimate vs. percentage being pirated. This isn't necessarily a complicated calculation. If you've sold 200,000 copies, and you get 800,000 games trying to authenticate, well, it's basic math to figure out how many are pirated copies.

Third, although I haven't had a chance to take a look at these numbers yet, and so I can't really comment in detail on them, Assassin's Creed II held off the pirates for a very long time, as opposed to Assassin's Creed I (which was heavily pirated from the outset), and so it is possible to compare the PC sales figures between the two to get at least a rough sense of how many lost sales there might have actually been.

All of this is more accurate than the poll cited by the original article, which, I might add, basically takes the people polled at their word. It reminds me a bit of those employment tests where they ask you if you've ever stolen anything - if you HAD stolen something, you're not exactly likely to reply with "yes"...

There is a much better and more detailed article on the subject here: http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html

"Really? Based on what metric?"

Based on piracy rates. I never said that a game couldn't be a success in the PC game market. I pointed out that, as the Tweakgames article stated, only two things actually had an impact on piracy rates:

1. The popularity of the game. If the game was more popular, the piracy rate was higher.

2. The presence of restrictive and intrusive DRM, which if not broken, actually does have the impact of lowering piracy rates until it is broken.

Nothing else made a difference. If a $20 game was as popular as a $60 game, it had the same level of piracy.

Did you even read the article I linked to?

"The simple fact that PC game developers are still in business and still making money, despite wasting who knows how many millions of dollars every year on failed anti-piracy measures is all it takes to prove otherwise."

Are they?

That's not a glib question. I started computer gaming in 1989 (and yes, I started out as a game pirate - I outgrew it by the age of 17, though). The PC game market is a wasteland today compared even to then. Only about ten years ago console ports were rare - now they're become more and more the norm. Most of the PC game market is concentrated in MMOs now. While there are still some big releases for the PC game market (eg., Starcraft II and Diablo III), most of the non-MMO releases start out on the console market, and the PC version comes out months later.

It's not rocket science to predict the trend. The PC games market that I started out in is long gone. The market from five years ago was far more rich and full than it is today. Yes, there are some big players still there, such as Stardock and Blizzard, but even Bioware is now starting its games on the console before the PC. The PC game makers are in the process of walking away. That's not a prediction - just an observation. It IS happening.

And, taking Stardock as an example, you haven't presented the whole story. Here's picking up after 2008:

March 27, 2009 - Stardock unveils a low customer impact DRM solution named GOO (Game Object Obfuscation). Source: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/stardock-goo-drm-copy-piracy,7390.html

May 1, 2009 - The Escapist, and a few others, report that Stardock has major piracy issues with Demigod (which does have DRM). Of 120,000 games connecting to the servers on the opening weekend, only 18,000 are legitimate. After the team spends a couple of days working on the servers, the CEO declares a victory against the pirates. Source: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/91400-Stardock-CEO-Demigod-Beats-Piracy

Now, that's a far cry from the DRM used by Ubisoft. But, it is important to note that Stardock DID end up implementing a very customer-friendly DRM solution, and got hit badly by piracy issues.

"The only possible metric you can use that would make what you said in any way correct is the one the big corporations use: that every pirated copy is a lost sale. So I guess it "fails utterly" if your metric is that they aren't making near as much money as they "could" be."

And with that, I KNOW you didn't read the article I linked to. That is a complete mischaracterization of the economic argument. You'll find a proper description here: http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_3.html

Please read that before you reply.

Okay, first off, let me just say that I don't support any DRM that takes away the rights of the legitimate consumer. So, this post should not be taken as an endorsement of Ubisoft's DRM.

However, that said, this is part of an arms race between game pirates and PC game producers that has been going on for years, and at this point most of the PC game world is now a casualty. There is a reason that the console is king right now, and the main PC game out there today is the MMORPG.

This article explains it better than I can, and anybody who really wants to understand this arms race should read it:

http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html

Of particular note is this page:

http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_4.html

It is long, and I disagree with one or two of the author's final conclusions, but it is very much worth the read, and when somebody actually does a serious running of the piracy figures, it is very eye-opening.

Okay, first off, let me just say that I don't support any DRM that takes away the rights of the legitimate consumer. So, this post should not be taken as an endorsement of Ubisoft's DRM.

However, that said, this is part of an arms race between game pirates and PC game producers that has been going on for years, and at this point most of the PC game world is now a casualty. There is a reason that the console is king right now, and the main PC game out there today is the MMORPG.

This article explains it better than I can, and anybody who really wants to understand this arms race should read it:

http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html

Of particular note is this page:

http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_4.html

It is long, and I disagree with one or two of the author's final conclusions, but it is very much worth the read, and when somebody actually does a serious running of the piracy figures, it is very eye-opening.

I am just Cc Cv http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_8.html :

BioShock was released on 21 August 2007, sporting a new version of SecuROM protection incorporating an online activation method. It wasn't until almost two weeks later that a working crack for the game was released, and in fact the crack came from an unknown third party, because the established cracking groups had been unsuccessful in getting around this version of SecuROM. 2K Games' Martin Slater said in this interview:

        We achieved our goals. We were uncracked for 13 whole days. We were happy with it. But we just got slammed. Everybody hated us for it. It was unbelievable... There is a lot of strain on our content-delivery servers and things like that, where everyone has to download a 10MB executable. I don't think we'll do exactly the same thing again, but we'll do something close. You can't afford to be cracked. As soon as you're gone, you're gone, and your sales drop astronomically if you've got a day-one crack.

More recently, the online activation methods of Mass Effect and GTA IV have similarly prevented fully working pirated versions of these games from being available until at least several days after their official release, and definitely not before release. What most users don't consider is that 'day-one' or 'day-zero' piracy as it's called is disproportionately more damaging to a game's sales than at any other time, as this article explains:

        Day zero piracy is where a game is released for free by pirates before the official release. It's disastrous for the developer and publisher because whatever route gets the game out to the gamer first will be the favoured choice, so a game uploaded to the internet before the release date will have a huge impact on sales.

It's around the release period when marketing hype has reached fever pitch, and gamers are most excited about getting a game. If a working pirated version is available at the same time, the potential for lost sales is enormous. Pete Hines of Bethesda Softworks recently confirmed the same thing when discussing concerns about Fallout 3's release, saying in response to a question about day-one piracy: "Yeah, it's a huge problem. Huge."

Even the makers of StarForce DRM have said exactly the same thing regarding the use of their protection technology. On the StarForce forums they said this:

        The purpose of copy protection is not making the game uncrackable - it is impossible. The main purpose is to delay the release of the cracked version. Maximum sales rate usually takes place in the first month(s) after the game release. If the game is not cracked in that period of time, then the copy protection works well.

To be honest, I don't think you get it. How many regular, normal users are going to google/torrent the hack?

To be honest, I don't think you get it. Do you think a company would bother developing DRM schemes if 99,7% of the buyers didn't care and bought whatever they can ?

http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_4.html :
The report concludes that "...by the end of 2007, there were more than one billion PCs installed around the world; nearly half have pirated software on them." ... For 2009, the most pirated PC game as reported in this article was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The PC version had a staggering 4.1 million downloads via torrents alone compared with an estimated 200,000 - 300,000 actual sales via retail and Steam

http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_8.html :
As yet another example of removing DRM not leading to any reduction in piracy, the game Demigod has been pirated so heavily in its initial release period that it has caused the game's servers to effectively go down. Out of the 120,000 connections made to the game's servers, over 100,000 were by confirmed pirates, leaving only around 18,000 legitimate purchasers.

Very interesting article.

To be honest, I don't think you get it. How many regular, normal users are going to google/torrent the hack?

To be honest, I don't think you get it. Do you think a company would bother developing DRM schemes if 99,7% of the buyers didn't care and bought whatever they can ?

http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_4.html :
The report concludes that "...by the end of 2007, there were more than one billion PCs installed around the world; nearly half have pirated software on them." ... For 2009, the most pirated PC game as reported in this article was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The PC version had a staggering 4.1 million downloads via torrents alone compared with an estimated 200,000 - 300,000 actual sales via retail and Steam

http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_8.html :
As yet another example of removing DRM not leading to any reduction in piracy, the game Demigod has been pirated so heavily in its initial release period that it has caused the game's servers to effectively go down. Out of the 120,000 connections made to the game's servers, over 100,000 were by confirmed pirates, leaving only around 18,000 legitimate purchasers.

Very interesting article.

Tweak Guides and their Ultimate Tweaking Companion is the first place I go when I need to optimize a computer or when someone who IS technically-minded asks me, the computer programmer in the family, for help. It is easily readable and free. You can also donate $ and get a bunch of extras. Additionally, the author makes guides for tweaking your PC for the best speed, overclocking, etc. and customizing for various games. It's an excellent resource.

Okay, here you go:

There was an article that was posted on Slashdot about piracy a while back. The quote I'm citing is on page 8, here:

http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_8.html

In this interview, Mark Slater from 2k games said this about the Bioshock release:

"We achieved our goals. We were uncracked for 13 whole days. We were happy with it. But we just got slammed. Everybody hated us for it. It was unbelievable... There is a lot of strain on our content-delivery servers and things like that, where everyone has to download a 10MB executable. I don't think we'll do exactly the same thing again, but we'll do something close. You can't afford to be cracked. As soon as you're gone, you're gone, and your sales drop astronomically if you've got a day-one crack."

Now, before everyone mods me down for ostensibly liking DRM, I can't stand DRM, and would like to see it gone -- however, the article does provide some interesting insights.

Windows will likely ignore setting a pagefile to zero as you
will read here:

http://forums.tweakguides.com/showthread.php?t=2082

Your eyes can only pickup 80fps anyway; you wouldn't know if it was 100 or 10,000 fps unless the fps counter didn't say.

Give your eyes some credit (and stop spreading that terrible rumor!). The US Air Force has shown that the human eye can detect and identify objects at slightly over 200 fps. Really we need to go WELL above 200 frames in order to get to true realism (perhaps to 500.) If you'd like a more in depth explanation of the 200+fps ability of the human eye, I'd refer you first to here: http://www.tweakguides.com/Graphics_5.html and secondly to Google. It's well documented. On the Tweakguides page there's even an application called FPS Compare that runs a 3D environment split down the center, with different rates on either side. It's interesting. You may not consciously notice the difference at first, but try the random testing (look at the readme file) and give it a shot. I could usually pick out the faster rate, even when comparing 80 to 100.

I'd bet that the reason we don't see another monkey island or similar is due to piracy.

Citation needed. (I never played it myself, but maybe it just sucked?)

Not enough to prevent 3 sequels, and a host of similar games. Then, in the late 90's, they disappeared. What came unto the scene in the late 90's? Online piracy, and a sharp rise to piracy, too. It might be a coincidence, but I think not.

Also, this assumes that every person who pirates a game/song would have bought it otherwise.

No it doesn't. It assumes that a significant part of the revenue is lost because people chose the free route.

The vast majority of pirates would never have paid for it to start with, so the company isn't actually making any less money than they would without piracy.

Citation needed. This is obviously fantasy. Of course, if the materials was not available for free, some more of it would have been bought.

It's the same argument we heard the RIAA made back in the 80's; it was "OMFG people are going to stop buying cassettes because now they can just record the music from the radio! We're gonna go bankrupt & all music on the planet will cease to exist!". And despite everybody & their dogs making 'mix tapes' and recording music from the radio, album sales soared to all-time record highs.

Flawed analogy. The tapes were of a poor quality and bothersome to make. That's what kept the copying at bay. And the advertising and general economic growth did the rest.

So no, people pirating the music don't hurt the bottom line. The only piracy that impacts sales to any extent is actually called "counterfeiting" i.e. when someone produces & sells hard-copy CD's, etc.

You live in a fantasy if you believe that. Just the other day was an article disproving that right here on slashdot.

The only up is that online games are having a ball, since cracking those are harder. My hope is that someday it will be feasible to simply host the game on some server and deliver all the content over the net, so that we can get rid of the arrrrggghh pirates.

This is actually done quite frequently. Many online games, especially mmorpg's, do exactly this. The ones who still make you buy a copy from the retail outlet are just trying to gouge you for even more cash. They base their business on revenue from subscriptions, the copies of the game discs themselves are just more gravy for the profit coffers. As an example, last time I checked you could download WoW for free direct from Blizzard, and they certainly aren't suffering.

So you are saying that these games are doing well because they are free of piracy? That seems to contradict what you wrote earlier.

open the console and type:
r_displayinfo = 1

then = 0 to turn it off again of course

Tweakguides has a short Crysis Warhead Tweak Guide though you'd need to refer to the main Crysis tweak guide for most of the info as there are only a few things that have changed. I use an autoexec.cfg to change several parameters that improve performance without having to turn down overall settings, and set a custom resolution to boot.

open the console and type:
r_displayinfo = 1

then = 0 to turn it off again of course

Tweakguides has a short Crysis Warhead Tweak Guide though you'd need to refer to the main Crysis tweak guide for most of the info as there are only a few things that have changed. I use an autoexec.cfg to change several parameters that improve performance without having to turn down overall settings, and set a custom resolution to boot.

Very good site: http://www.tweakguides.com/ I've been using a few of his guides for a reference now for a couple years.

While I agree that this spoofing is potentially problematic, I do think there is a reason they're doing it. Obviously their intention is to increase their users' security, by including the LinkScanner option, and perhaps spoofing IE is just a means to that end. Assuming this to be true, ultimately the aim of this extra measure is with good intent (better security = good). Besides, as many people have pointed out (including me, in another reply), you can omit these features during installation by some command line usage. Additionally, I might point out that the TweakGuides Tweaking Companion http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html offers additional hints at backing down some of AVG 8.0's resource hogging aspects that other commenters have complained about.

Regarding installing AVG withOUT certain elements, I strongly suggest the "The TweakGuides Tweaking Companion." It explains exactly how to do that very thing (pg. 106-107, I think). It's a terrific source of information, and is available for free at: http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html

You don't notice choppiness when films are showing panning scenes? TV is 30 frames per second, but it's interlaced so you get 60 fields per second. If you want a real demo that 30fps isn't nearly enough, check out fpscompare, linked from this article.

http://www.tweakguides.com/Hosting.html

The company discussed here left a few friends of mine stranded as well.

You get what you pay for.

"I read this statement and almost immediatly thought "How lame would that be?" "

There's a Doom3 mod that allows one to play as a monkey who's "gun" is coconuts. It has a catchy tune.

It also seems that others have the "quality" itch as well.

You can tell Firefox to be smarter about memory usage in about:config (type that into the address bar). Create a key called browser.cache.memory.capacity of type integer and set it equal to -1. Also set browser.cache.memory.enable of type boolean to true. This should drastically reduce your Firefox's memory usage, at least by 50%-60%. Granted, this setting should be more obvious from the main prefs instead of being so hackish, but it can be done. More details on this and other tweaks in the link below:

          http://www.tweakguides.com/Firefox_8.html

The Field of View of the camera can cause your symptoms.
I can play most FPS games, but my head almost explodes whenever the drugged about to explode effects come into play.
Most notably, in original Unreal tournament when you fall off a spaceship or into the pressure chamber the camera does some crazy shit and makes me want to puke.

Anyway, the HL2 camera might be outside your comfortable range.
You could try bringing up the console and changing this:

fov [angle] - Specifies the character's Field of View (fov), i.e. the total angle which can be viewed at once. Default is 75, higher values create more of a "fish-eyed" view, lower angles create a zoomed view.

default_fov [angle] - Determines the default Field of View in HL2. Default is 75 (cheat).

See here for the rest of the commands.

You'll be glad to know that there are several mods for Oblivion that enhance the distant land textures with higher-resolution ones. They make a big difference. You might want to check them out:

Landscape LOD Replacement (21MB) - This mod replaces all the distant blurry LOD landscapes with better looking higher resolution textures. This means you don't have to use the uGridsToLoad command, and hence you won't experience any major performance reductions or visual glitches. More details here.

Landscape LOD Replacement (Border Regions) (42MB) - By the same author as the mod above, this mod fixes all the blurry landscapes from the border regions as well. More details here.

Normal Map LOD Replacement (16.5MB) - This mod replaces all the normal maps for distant land - basically it improves the shadows in all distant terrain, and is a great complement to the Landscape LOD Replacement mods further above.

http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_4.html

I have a 6600 GT (and Athlon 2400+) and it runs smoothly at 1024x768 with most of the settings dialed up.

Install the latest Doom 3 patch, the latest Nvidia Forceware patch, and the latest motherboard and sound card patches.

For me, turning off EAX, setting the card's Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filtering control panel to 'Application Preference', and setting image_cacheMinK higher in autoexec.cfg (see page 7&8 of the guide) all seemed to make the biggest difference.

For more info, try the tweak guide.

• Figure out a permanent size for your paging file. I recommend having 2gigs of memory (RAM + paging) for Windows XP. I have 1 gig of RAM, so I figured 1024MB was good (as the article says, you should probably determine what your maximum load is and then choose a size). Allowing the paging file to grow and shrink will always introduce fragmentation.
  
• If possible, put the paging file on a separate disk than the one Windows is installed on. This will reduce head movement on the system disk and decrease access time for the paging file.
  
• If you're using DisKeeper, have it place the paging file at the beginning of the partition. Again, this should reduce access time.
  

Doom 3 wouldn't run if you had Nero installed, and yes it created an uproar:

Installation/Loading Problems: Many users report that they have difficulty installing or launching Doom 3. It is important to understand that Doom 3 uses a copy protection system which objects to the presence of CloneCD, Alcohol, Daemon Tools and even Nero Burning Rom (in rare cases). So if you are experiencing these problems make sure you disable and even uninstall any such software if you want Doom 3 to run. Don't tell me this isn't cool, I agree with you.

from Doom 3 article.

Oh, and apparently some new EA games like Sims 2:

Sims 2 blocked by CD copying software.

You have propaply allready seen this, but anyway here goes (don't know if it works on Linux though - but cannot see why it shouldn't):

The following commands control the image cache, which if enabled and set correctly can help smooth FPS and may also boost performance:

image_useCache [0,1] - If set to 1, uses background loading to cache image information. This may not necessarily improve framerate performance, but it does assist in smoothing out frame rates and reducing loading pauses. Note that the image_cacheMinK (see below) size must be raised from its default otherwise the game will crash when using this setting. Once this setting is enabled, the actual cache value is set in the image_cacheMegs setting below.

image_cacheMegs [Megabytes] - Determines the maximum amount of system memory to allocate to temporary loading of full-sized precompressed images if the cache is enabled by setting image_useCache to 1. Note that since this caching only applies to precompressed images, using the Ultra Quality setting will render this setting useless, since at Ultra quality no texture compression is used. Since a cache is only a temporary holding area, and not the place where the entire game is meant to reside, do not raise this value to something extremely high as that will simply reduce the available memory for the rest of Doom 3. Try a value of 128MB for those with 512MB of system RAM, and if you have more than 1GB of RAM, you can try a higher value like 196MB or 256MB for example. Do not set this to half your system RAM or some other monstrous amount.

image_cacheMinK [KiloBytes] - This setting determines the minimum size in KB for precompressed image files to be loaded into the cache. To make sure most image files can be loaded, and to also prevent a system crash when enabling caching, select a value like 3072 to start with. Raising this setting may improve caching, but it may also hinder caching if most textures are below the size you specify, so don't just raise this value for the hell of it.

got this from here

and if you have some extra space on your hard-drive go look here