I went from a dual core 2.66Ghz and a 1GB video card to a 3.6Ghz and 2GB video card and with the same fully loaded game have slight improvement. Sure I can load more textures but the number of objects and NPC added by mods is not handled much better by a quad core 3.6Ghz processor than my 2.66Ghz processor. Still have the same issues with many NPCs and objects.
it is back to how it was on the old PC.

Only real improvement with the new PC is when I just have vanilla installed with just some texture mods. Once you add monsters and NPCs, it is nearly the same as the old PC. Others may have a different experience, but for me, this is what it is. Skyrim, however, runs like a champ. No CTDs, no lag, and I have all the new hogh rez Skyrim textures installed.

I have exactly the same experience, and for a long time already.

The best (well worst actually) yardstick for me is to enter the IC Market District from the north gate (where the bridge is). I have a fast dual core (stock is 3 GHz speed) as you can see below. Upon entering, with the mods I'm running I'm down to the 11 - 12 FPS range, give or take a bit. I recently overclocked the rig once again to 3.6 GHz (+20%) to see how much it improves overall, and the gain in FPS is mostly not noticeable. In those "bad" moments in the IC Market the FPS still goes down to those ranges, and normally it runs just fine anyway even at stock speed. Only improvement I do notice when overclocked is that the F2 inventory menu opens more quickly if you have many items. But FPS-wise there is not much change.

With an up-to-date graphics card (460 1GB or 6850 1GB or better), the game is very much CPU-limited. Just no way around it. One would need a 10+ GHz CPU to get decent FPS always, everywhere.

Not I. I played that game for about 100 hours* before I started experiencing this problem; before that, I could play for an hour or so with no problems, though my FPS was in 15-225 in most places.

*This was with a dual-core, 3 GB RAM, and an Nvidia 9500 (512 MB VRAM).

I'm going to try something I just thought of - setting game resolution to be the same as native resolution. I upgraded to an ATI 5770 sometime around the time this problem started; native is 1280 x 1024, but I'm using 1024 x 768. I use native res on Skyrim, and I can run Ultra with no problems.

Edit: Well... it fixed some of my problems, but not all of them. Heh. Turns out the map I use also displays the roads from Roads + Bridges, which I'd forgotten about; they weren't displaying before for some reason (which is likely why the game often crashed when I tried to open the map), but they do now. My HUD also looks slightly different. Still having that crashing problem, though...

I do not get crashes when I fast travel, but it seems our problem are the same, but mine sometimes crashes within 5 minutes sometimes crashes after haf an hour or so, its very random, but mostly within a short time frame. Mine is a recent reinstall though I remembered I did not have so much problem then, but probably is I just skimmed through the game last time. What mods do you have installed and do you crashed in interior cells while changing cells or only exterior in the wilderness?

Totally agreed, When I had a low fps, I had to slow down my pace and walk rather than run, as running would cause the processor to need to generate the terrain or something faster and thus making the processor unable to keep up or something? Correct me if I'm wrong.

Yes, that's what I suspected as well, I seem to always had crash when there is NPCs fighting with MM creatures in the wilderness.

Seems like it is the same problem as Morrowind which is CPU limited but I read somewhere that Oblivion's engine is more on the graphic cards.

Probably you can like me delete some NPC adding mods in the wilderenss? It sort of seems better for me when I removed Tamriel travellers and Immersive Travellers, but I still experience that dread crash. Probably I have to remove RAEWVD but it is such a great mod.

One thing you could still try is reduce the uGridDistant... settings in the oblivion.ini. As a test reduce them both to 12, then viewing distances are not as far but should reduce the RAEWVD impact. I read that elsewhere in these forums, but it seems logical. Maybe worth a try?

These two:

uGridDistantTreeRange=12
uGridDistantCount=12

I checked last night... I'm getting 35+ FPS outdoors (35 was near Bravil; out in the wilderness, I get 45-55), so I doubt it's NPCs. I think it's something to do with OBSE; I've had this problem before - either there's a missing dll, the wrong version of OBSE is installed, or there's a conflict between two or more mods that use OBSE. I know I've got OBSE 20.6, and I'm fairly sure I've got all the dlls (I'll double-check later), so all that's left is conflicts. I upgraded the UOP to 3.4.1 around the time the problems started, but no one else has reported anything similar, so I dunno.

Thanks, I will give it a try.
How do you know if a mod has OBSE conflicts in game beside reading the readme? Crashes are such a migraine; they come suddenly and go suddenly.

Haha. I just had to apply the 4GB patch today specifically because of this issue.

It's the *kind* of crashes - crashing when opening a container (especially), or on transitions. I'm not saying this is always the cause, but I've found that it does cause these kinds of things - when I upgraded to UOP 3.4, for example, I forgot to install the OBSE jail fix dll, and it crashed every 5-10 minutes until I figured it out.

O, this had got me, may I ask what is OBSE jail fix?

In vanilla Oblivion, when you get tossed in jail, there's supposed to be a *chance* something like (1-5%) that your Security skill increases... except it doesn't work. The jail fix dll is designed to fix that.

I guess I might have find out the casue of my every 10-15 mintues crashes in the wilderness and cell transitions. When I removed MMM, everything went fine, I had no crashes for an hour at the widerness and no crashes during cell transitions. But it is so strange in that nobody had problems with MMM except me, though it may not be MMM's fault as I had removed crowded roads and tamriel travellers as well. I had added back Immersive Travellers.

Certainly, the crashes had removed significantly when I removed MMM. Anybody knows why? Is it because of the scripts from MMM or ihe spawn points? The roads are quieter now but I had to sacrifice that for stability.

Probably because noone has problems with MMM except you. Oblivion engine is a misterious thing. I remember some time ago playing almost without any crashes, but had some minor stuttering. I scouted this forum for recommendations and switched on handling of critical sections in OSR ini file. This changed nothing, and it was late evening so I went to sleep and totally forgot about it. I couldn't play the next week since was busy, but when I returned to game it started to CTD randomly in wilderness on cell transitions for no obvious reason. I spent countless hours removing mods from my installation but the game was still living its own short life.
I finally remembered about that switch, and BAM - almost flawless playing again, still some CTDs here and there but I always had them. You kind of doomed to crash when using a lot of mods and replacements anyway.
Does it mean that OSR's critical sections are broken? I guess no, since hundreds of people are using them and don't complain. It is just my mods/hardware are not suited for them. The same is with MMM - works for 99%... with you being one of the rest 1% who has a particular mods and PC prone to crash with it. Unfortunate, but almost nothing you can do. If you really want MMM it would be better to start from a fresh clean oblivion+UOP+MMM slowly adding other mods and playtesting.

Probably Crowded Roads is what did it, not MMM - lots of other people note having problems with too many NPCs. If you really want to test it, add Crowded Roads back in and see what happens.

Agreed, Oblivion's engine is a real mystery and it may be my system or one of the mods hiding there killing it.
I had tried to remove Crowded Roads and keep MMM before,, the crashes are reduced but not by much, it was when I removed MMM then the crashes reduced significantly in wilderness. Cell transitions crash are r educed too but transitions from town to wilderness stll remain crashy.

Are you using/have you tried MMM spawn rates reduced? It might be that MMM is spawning too many creatures; that, along with all the NPCs from Crowded Roads, could be wreaking havoc on your processors.

Not using that, probably I should try using the reduced reduced spawn and no wilderness and no extra wounding to see how is the effect like.

I've had exactly the same problems that are being described in this thread, in past games. I also used MMM. I just started a game without MMM and, as much as I hate to say it (because I dearly love MMM) my game has been CTD-free so far. This is not proof positive that my CTDs were caused by MMM but I'm at a loss to explain it any other way.

I don't recall having regular CTDs when I used older versions of MMM. In my case it just seems to have happened in the last couple of years. I wonder if my computer didn't like the switch to MMM's .bsa format perhaps.

Agreed I seem to crash more if I have MMM even if I use less spawns and wilderness. The crashes seems reduced but is still more if I do not have MMM. Probably our PC did not like MMM.

I just wanted to bump this, because I *finally* figured out the cause of my crashing. It really was something small and stupid like I thought - two faulty entries in the ini file. I use Phinix DarkUI, which changes three font entries; two of them read sFontFile= instead of SFontFile=. Since the ini file entries are case-sensitive, the game kept choking on those. I only found it because I renamed my ini file, let the game generate a new one, then compared both files line by line to see if anything stood out.

So, my advice: rename the old ini, let the game generate a new one, and change only the settings you absolutely need to (controls, screen resolution), then play a bit and see what happens. You might be able to pin down some problems there.

Glad that you had found the source to your game crashing. WEll forgive me, Im a bit loss here, as I had followed your instruction and made a copy of my Oblivion.ini and just let the game generate a new copy, and it crashes half way while loading a save game. Decided to revert back to my backed up inin and live with the every 15mins or 1/2 hour crashy game (I love MMM, so I'm living with it, probably will delete it once I finish this game?)

Try regenerating the ini file and starting a new game. My guess is that there's something wrong with the ini file vis-a-vis your current save, otherwise it wouldn't do that. Also, did you compare the settings?

If you delete the Oblivion.ini file, and are using Darn UI or another UI replacer, don't you need to reinstall the UI mod such that ini settings point to the correct fonts?

Oh it must have been Darn UI, had to reinstall that, will try that out later.

You can do it manually. The OMOD version of DarN might make the changes itself, I dunno; Detailed Terrain (OMOD) does. With Phinix, you have to do it yourself, but he puts all the entries in the readme so you can simply C&P them.

Edit: Oh, and I've found several duplicate entries in my ini file, too. I've been using more or less the same ini for years, so they were probably added by me screwing around for some reason. With all the issues I've found, it's a wonder my game worked at all.