I've been heavily modding Oblivion goty and have finally finished installing everything I want into a stable build. Needless to say my fps took a hit for each intensive mod I installed. Before RAEVWD and Open Cities I would get a somewhat steady 40fps. Afterwards I'll get 30-40 outside and go down to 25 when approaching a city. In some parts of the city I'll drop to 14 fps, but mostly I'm around 18-25. I thought his was due simply from my hardware reaching it's limits but a part of me just didn't see how a quad core and a 570gtx were unable to bulldoze through everything. So I did some basic troublshooting. I put EVGA precision and Task Manger in a second monitor(hdtv actually) and started up Oblivion. I went to an area where I get 14-18 fps and looked at resources being used. To my surprise my gpu is only 50-60% under load, my cpu is 40-50% under load(multiple cores under load_primarily 2 cores tho), my RAM had 1.1 gb free, vram however only had ~100 MB free. So I'm curious, what's causing my fps to drop so much here. The only thing in short supply is vram and I didn't think vram would limit fps so much. Is my vram being nearly full causing this or should I look elsewhere for increasing fps? Could it be that the Byro engine itself is what's causing things to slowdown? Specs and Mods below.

PC specs: Gigabyte GA-MA770-UD3($50 mobo), G.SKILL ddr2-800 RAM, Phenom II X4 940 @3.3, EVGA superclocked GTX 570, Western Digital 1tb Caviar Black(300GB free), W7-64 Ultimate, resolution 1680x1050, game version: Steam GoTY.



Installed Mods: QTP3, UOP_3.2, QTP3_UOP32 Patch, MEAT, Natural Faces, All Natural, Deadly Reflex(all recommended supporting mods as well -HUD mod), Immersive Interiors, Alive Waters, Subtle Sun, Beautiful Stars, Improved Tree/Flora/Doors/1&2, Improved Meats and Vegetables, RAEVWD(configured with TES4LoDGen), Open Cities, and Darnified UI.

I also have the 4gb patch, OSR, FoV Modifier, and OBGEv3. All optional files for OBGEv3 except Physically Correct Sky are installed and working. Shaders I use are Crysis DoF, God Rays, Color Correction, SSAO, and SSII. My oblivion config is edited to increase LoD object rendering distance, tree detail distance, and the distance at which grass is rendered. OBSE & Nifse are installed ofc, as well as the mesh fixes provided by Smooth for DR6.

I've got higher specs than you and I still have problems with RAEVWD. Oblivion just isn't optimized to use anything higher than a dual-core CPU and 2GB of RAM. I haven't tried RAEVWD with the 4GB patch, but I don't imagine it'd do much better.

IMO, it's not worth it. You can probably keep Open Cities and everything else, but RAEVWD is definitely killing your game.

The bottleneck is the engine. It's notoriously inefficient and can only utilize one core of the CPU at any given time.

If you are REALLY anol about that performance boost, Intel's latest Sandy Bridge CPUs did help my own game start performing better, but you can't make that upgrade without gutting your whole system. Neither can you do anything about your aging RAM, unfortunately (DDR2 is being phased out now).

My advice? Read the RAEVWD readme and follow what it says to do in the event of FPS problems. You'd be surprised how helpful that kind of information is.

As Thomas said DDR2 is getting old and you really should upgrade to some ddr3 ram, however i seriously doubt that's the major issue. As you've pointed out your vram ended up being 100mb from the limit, now for any memory to go within 200mb or so of its limit then you will suffer considerable loss of performance and also regular ctds.

Will check out the readme now. Recall something along those lines being in it. Forgot I suppose. Anyhow, some solid information given so far even though it kind of just encompasses the problem being synergistic rather than one issue. I'm aware of how old dd2 is, been waiting on Bulldozer to release b4 deciding whether to Intel or AMD for my next upgrade, which was planned to be in April, meh.

Other than disabling RAEVWD any ideas on how to lower vram? Another 100MB would be enough to reduce that from seriously affecting fps?

i assume when you said qtp3 you meant qtp3 full, if thats the case try changing to qtp3 redimized. it simply is amazing and you hardly have any visual loss while having less strain on your system. Also i believe OBGE shaders cause a pretty decent strain on your gcard too, remember most of the time game stuttering and ctds are caused not by cpu overloading but vram overloading.

RAEVWD's VRAM usage isn't high enough to be that critical, so I'd go with the advice to scale back on QTP3. One thing though. Your list of graphic enhancers is pretty big. Have you given any thought to including a 2GB video card in your next upgrade?

That's a very difficult upgrade to make, unfortunately, as it would mean swapping Motherboards. You can't use DDR3 RAM in a DDR2 Main Board, the sticks wont fit the key on the DIMM slots.

well yeah, obviously i guess i probably should've mentioned that...in any case like i said i still don't regard ram as being a major cause for the majority of issues relating to system overloading. Switching ram or increasing ram usually doesn't change performance that much.

Try disabling SSII. That can cause a pretty significant performance impact, as well as SSAO, depending on which you're using. Having both RAEVWD and OBGE assures that you won't get optimal framerates, as far as I can tell. As for vram usage, as mentioned you're not going to want to use full QTP3 unless you've got 2gb of vram. If you happen to be using 4096 lods, those can add significantly to vram usage.

Before I got a pretty much state-of-the-art (for another month or so probably, knowing how things go lololol) 2gb card, using full QTP3 and fatty lods was not working for me. But the problem with that is more stuttering and crashes than framerate, I think. While I was able to boost my "baseline" framerate and got a lot more consistent performance switching from a 4850 to a 6950, I still get slideshows sometimes when there are a lot of NPCs on screen, usually during random battles happening along the roads. But I'm pretty uncompromising, and recently went from using four different road traveller mods to just one . Oblivion is super demanding on CPUs though, so I imagine going from the 2.6 @ 2.99 Phenom2 I have now to something with another 1000 MHz or so I'd see better performance in those heavy AI situations.

But it's important to remember that even with the best video card and CPU, a heavily pimped-out Oblivion is just not going to give you some constant high framerate, like, ever. I'm one of those that's happy with 20-30 fps, so it works out for me.

I suppose I wasn't entirely clear. By upgrade I mean upgrade to SB or Bulldozer which would require an AM3+ mobo or p67, which would no doubt use dual or triple channel ddr3. When stating I planned to upgrade in April I was referencing that Bulldozer was suppose to release in April until it was delayed, again.

Not entirely true. Yes, it would make it more difficult, but if you're not going crazy on shaders and are using a modest configuration for RAEVWD, you'll do just fine.

I'm probably an exception here, but I use full RAEVWD (minus the IC) along with Godrays and Liquid Water. Game runs buttery smooth and I'm quite happy with it. It's the NPCs that doom me every single time. Too many in one place, bye bye framerates.

What kind of CPU do you have? I plan to upgrade at some point, though I'm not expecting miracles in the multiple-NPCs area. It has to give me something, though. Skyrim better run nicely, at least

Also yeah I was going to type "OBGE with SSAO and all the trimmings" but I thought "who could resist SSAO?" because it is so lovely :teehee: pushing my video card to its limits right now spoiling myself with HBAO

I guess I'll try the redimized version then. Will I need to do a fresh install or just install it over the QTP3 Full? Also, I haven't had a single ctd yet.


I've been thinking about looking at the 600/7000 series that will come out next. AMD and Nvidia have been, well, hyping how much more powerful they'll be.



I was getting 40-60fps with my current OBGE settings before DR6, RAEVWD, and Open Cities. I could muster 30-40fps with HBAO instead of SSAO. OBGE isn't what hurting me atm. I'd be fine with 25-30fps as this isn't a shooter.


The readme talks about optimizing meshes with 'PyFFI'. Will that make much of a difference, or am I showing how much of a noob I am for even asking?

PyFFI optimization will make a difference, since almost every single vanilla mesh is completely unoptimized and contains a lot of unneeded data.

Check the PyFFI thread if you need more info on that.

@Palidoo: It's an AMD quad-core 3.2Ghz. Does phenomenally well in every other game EXCEPT Oblivion, which svcks since I got it specifically FOR Oblivion

@LastQuestion: The meshes in RAEVWD have already been PyFFI'd. Further down in the readme is a section that lists specific things to try when having FPS issues.

I didn't find it (PyFFIing meshes) made much of a difference, but maybe others experienced differently.

But also I found using SSII and using HBAO rather than volumetric SSAO caused noticeable performance impacts, so obviously everyone's setup is different.

Try an Intel Sandy Bridge, it worked wonders for me (Core i5-2500K), it probably got me an extra 5 to 7 frames over my last one.

See, this is what leaps at me, as a candidate for "most grievous".

That and you are possibly running out of VRAM, as mentioned upthread. Check on that, and if you are, adjust your mods accordingly.

Similarly, take careful note of exactly when your machine is lagging. It might be more to do with NPC AI, for example. In which case, that is CPU-bound performance, and the only thing to do is cut down on NPCs and/or elaborate AI.

Oh wow. I missed that part entirely. This game cannot process that much information. Increasing the LOD distance would place a much larger burden on the polygon count than normal, and throwing RAEVWD in on top of that is almost certainly what crippled things. Otta be a big red banner somewhere telling people it doesn't matter how uber their rigs are, DON'T DO IT.

Unfortunately I'd have to get a new motherboard and I'm trying not to do that since I figure the cpu will be expensive enough. Probably going to go for 3.6 GHz or so, I think.

What is increasing the lod distance? Is that increasing uGridsToLoad? (aka total destruction)

I increase the distances for lights and specular and stuff in the ini to absurd levels, which is also a good way to hurt your framerate.

Probably the uGridsDistantCount, which is far more painfully deadly than most other things you could do to the game.

As I stated in the OP, in the area(s) I'm lagging my gpu and cpu both are only being utilized at around 50% of their processing capabilities.

I see.

Well, regardless, the first thing to do would be, get rid of any changes like the one Arthmoor called out. Especially that one, actually. Courting FPS death might not be the optimal approach to performance gains, it would seem.