I am hearing from a friend who has it on Xbox that installing the game to the Xbox hard drive helps with the loading times when traveling. true?
Don't know for certain, but if the PC version is anything to go by, anything you can do to speed up loading times is probably a good thing. I imagine that it'll load from the hard drive a lot faster than the DVD.
As for travelling, in general I found the game "played" better if I wandered around on foot rather than fast-travelling (i.e. hopping straight to another point on the map). Not sure if that's relevant to what you were getting at, but thought I'd say it anyway.
It is worth saying that Oblivion doesn't run as smoothly as Ego Draconis in spite of also using the Gamebryo engine so don't expect to be able to completely banish stuttering and pausing.
anyways, I will probably go Xbox. Only games I really ever played on PC are RTS. Plus I doubt my computer will meet the requirements to make the graphics as good as or better than Xbox. I was just browsing through mods today and saw a bunch of mods for new races that piqued my interest.
It's unfortunate that Oblivion's hardware requirements are so high; it can still strain even current high-end PCs (well, if you add high-res textures and other highly-detailed areas like Bananasplit's Better Cities, which might be considered to be moving the goalposts!) but even without any extras, it's still extremely difficult to banish stuttering completely.
