Just installed oblivion on windows 7 64 bit, no mods, no antivirus, it runs pretty smoothly except when I look at a group of npcs, where it drops down to <15 fps

It's just looking at them that causes the problem, if I look down at the ground it runs fast again

i5 750 @ 4.0 ghz
ati 5970
4 gb ddr3 2000
velociraptor hdd

It seems pretty similar to the Fallout New Vegas npc lag glitch...but none of those fixes worked for me.

And yeah, I run crysis maxed at 60 fps. So no more "you're hardware just isn't good enough" like I see in most threads asking about this problem....

That's normal. Oblivion is not optimized very well and is CPU heavy. Lots of NPCs means lots of AI packages which means lots of processing. Any system can see lag in those situations. There are mods, such as Oblivion Stutter Remover (requires OBSE) which can help, but it's really a built-in weakness of the game's design.

If your FPS is fine otherwise, there is little you can do to improve that particular exception.


--Tomlong75210