So Nehrim is a lovely full conversion mod of Oblivion, but it's notorious for running terribly slow on just about any system. I decided to look into this a little more by displaying my CPU and GPU use in-game with MSI Afterburner. Much to my surprise, even in the crowded cities, where my FPS sometimes drops below 15, CPU use was below 60% on all cores and GPU use maxed out around 25%. So, based on this, perhaps CPU and GPU power aren't really the limiting factor here? Could it be hard drive limited? If I can get my hands on a spare SSD I'd be interested to try it out. Maybe it's something else entirely?


Here are my System specs, nothing amazing, but pretty competent. And again, at least if I read the data right, it isn't a CPU or GPU limit that's killing the framerate.

i3-530 @ 3.8 GHz w/ CM Hyper 212+ Cooler
ASRock H55DE3
Sapphire Radeon 6850 1GB
8GB Ripjaw X DDR3 1600
500GB WD Caviar Blue
Seasonic X750 PSU
CM Elite 430 Mid Tower

Here's a little guide on how to set up MSI Afterburner for in-game display:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1229915/how-to-cpu-and-gpu-usage-along-with-fps-in-game

Anyway, if anyone else has Nehrim installed, feel free to post your CPU use, GPU use, and FPS in some of the hotspots (Erothin and other large cities mainly), as well as your system specs.

It's the same as the Oblivion bottlenecks....

An SSD will help if you can get one.

This usually indicates a CPU bottleneck. The engine is not very efficient, if it were optimized for quad-core CPUs then you most likely would not run into these FPS drops (look at Skyrim, it runs better than Oblivion in crowded areas but there's still room for improvement).

IIRC Alexander Blade said something about making http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=6058 for Oblivion. It may have been Fallout though (or both, perhaps... I can't remember). Hopefully it can be done for Oblivion, it would certainly help FPS in these areas.

SSD won't help much, if at all, for increasing your framerate. You will notice faster loading times and maybe a little less stutter when exploring.

Shadows were extremely intensive in Oblivion, so you may want to consider disabling those to see how it effects your FPS. Other than that all I can think of doing is upgrading your CPU or overclocking it further.

I also mentioned no more than 60% use on any single CPU core. If the game can't even fully utilize one CPU core, I wouldn't say that is indicative of a CPU bottleneck.

As I said, it's not efficient nor optimized for modern CPUs, that's why most people will get a CPU bottleneck unless they have a very low end GPU. Most games aren't optimized for modern CPUs, in fact. Only one I can think of that has actually utilized my processor fully is Battlefield 3.

I've never seen Oblivion maintain 100% on my GPU or either of the cores in my CPU...and they're both very weak. Oblivion Stutter Remover will help if you don't have it installed, and I suppose Streamline would as well. Beyond that there's not a whole lot you can (easily) do.

EDIT: I don't know about ATI GPUs, but on my Nvidia GPU there's a setting for "maximum frames to prerender before the CPU processes them". I've found that messing with that setting, which has a default of 3, can improve the engine's performance somewhat.
EDIT 2: Assuming that you're on a 64-bit operating system, be sure you also have the 4GB patch applied to Oblivion's EXE. And you could try tweaking some of the memory settings in Oblivion's INI file. I've found that that, in combination with disabling hard drive caching in the Oblivion INI file, does wonders for me.

You're going to run into the same problems with Nehrim that plague modded Oblivion. The engine itself is to blame for 90% of the trouble. All the hardware in the world you throw at it won't matter. It's built on a single threaded game engine that's long past its life expectancy.

That said, I never had much of an issue with it except for parts of the city of Erothin. The rest of it was pretty smooth running despite it having far more detail than even the most heavily modified Oblivion game. I think that's in part due to the continent being smaller and therefore having less to display at LOD distances, which is something this game engine just can't deal with.