Hi, I haven't played Oblivion in years and I've recently modded up a new game. My machine is far and away more powerful than the one I played on back in '08/09 and yet even with the 4gig patch, I'm not getting the kind of FPS I would think possible. Back in the day I was playing with AEVWD, Qarls IIIR, higher res distant LODs, All Natural, AWLS, etc... lots of other mods and so on and I'd get around 17 or 18fps. That was on an E8400 dual core @ 3.0ghz, 4 gigs of ram and SLI 8800 Ultras.

Today I run an i5 quad at 3.6, 16 gigs of ram (most of which I know isn't used), and SLI 560's (2gb effective vram). I'm playing with many of the same mods and I'm getting around 26 fps. This is with streamline, Operation Optimization, and OSR. I haven't messed with the INI yet at all.

I guess my question is this: is there basically a cieling at which it doesn't matter how powerful your rig is? Sorry if I should have posted this in hardware.

OK, is this a steady 26 or does it drop to 26? Because, no matter what, the game will have FPS drops, which is why most people clamp the frame rates to something like 35 to 40, to mask the inevitable drops.

If it is just dropping into the 20's and runs most of the time faster than that, turn off the FPS display and enjoy the game.

Don't use operation optimization

It's averaging 26 or so outdoors, sometimes droping down a bit. Inside I get 30's.

In fact, I almost never use FRAPS because I don't notice FPS until it drops below 24 or so. The reason I was hoping to achieve greater frame rate was to have more headroom in an attempt (not sure if its possible) to get greater draw distances through ini tweaks. I perhaps naively thought having a faster CPU, more and faster ram, and faster video ram than my old computer, I'd be able to go a bit bezerk with viewable objects or alternately use OBGE for more graphical effects, or use an ENB. If I'm alreayd at 26fps, there is no way I can play with an ENB running, it'll be a slideshow.

This same machine can run FO:NV with Ugrids at 9, tons of 2k+ texture replacers, weather mods, and all sorts of other things, and get acceptable frame rates.

The gentleman above mentioned don't use Operation Optimization. Maybe some clarification on that? I'll do some reading in the meanwhile. Thanks.

I just get the feeling something isn't right here. Are there perhaps some techniques others carry out to get better performance? I know my CPU isn't the current greatest thing, but it's far and away better than my old E8400 Wolfdale. I should prob have attached a spoiler hidden list of my mods but I'm stealing from my employers time right now. Maybe I'll do that when I get home later. In the meanwhile here are my specs in case that helps.

ASrock Z77 Extreme3

Intel Core i5-3470 Ivy Bridge 3.2 (3.6 turbo)

16 gb DDR3 1600

(2) GTX 560 2gb DDR5 256-bit

Samsung 830 S/ATA III SSD (game is played from this)

WD 500GB S/ATA II (storage)

ample PSU and cooling

Re: "faster processor", remember, just like Oblivion has trouble using all available RAM, it also has trouble using more than one core on your processor, so your processing speed may be limited to the speed your multi core processor gets out of a single core. I don't know enough about it to know whether this can be improved by turbo mode or not, but I thought I'd point it out.

In terms of pure Ghz my new proc is only two tenths 'faster' than my old one, so in that respect I haven't improved much I suppose.

One thing that can help is to play under a strict clean boot

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135

These have more a stability benefit than a frame rate benefit

bUseThreadedBlood=1 (default 0)
bUseThreadedMorpher=1 (default 0)
bUseThreadedTempEffects=1 (default 0)
bUseThreadedParticleSystem=1 (default 0)
bUseBackgroundPathing=1 (default 0)
bUseBackgroundFileLoader=1 (default 0)
iNumHavokThreads=3 (default 1)
iThreads=10 (default 3)

Sorry I was in a bit of rush, that's why I didn't add more info. Anyway I've got more info, you can find them here:

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1436439-operation-optimization/?hl=%2Boperation+%2Boptimization
http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1121062-operation-optimization/?hl=%2Boperation+%2Boptimization

The game is almost a decade old. It was not optimized for PC when it was made for console. Well back then, multi-core processors were still being developed into mainstream products. That is probably the reason why you can run Fallout3 without any trouble but Oblivion has issues. Best thing you could do is to use mods that improve performance i.e OSR or Streamline or both. I do not recommend either because it tends to cause stability issues. Alternatively, you can use Pyffi to optimize the meshes to remove unnecessary data.. Bottom line is do not go overboard with installing mods. It will get ugly.