So why exactly shouldn't one use OPO?

Because there are some errors in some of the meshes that can crash your game. They got a little carried away when they optimized some of them, and removed things they shouldn't have. Not only that, but it's pretty much redundant now that PyFFI is available. It only deals with a few meshes in the game, whereas using PyFFI you can optimize most of them. So you'll get a lot more benefit using that utility rather the mod itself. The same applies with Operation Optimization, it's not going to help you all that much compared to using PyFFI.

Okay. I'll stay away from OPO then. I PyFFI all my meshes. But I'd like to increase my FPS some. Every little bit helps. Pisses me off that I'm running 2 GTX 480's in SLI and only get 35 - 60 (well that's capped by OSR) outdoors with Streamline and fully PyFFI'd meshes.

Don't assume your graphics cards are all your FPS depends on. Your CPU is stressed out more than your GPU when it comes to Bethesda's games. If you want to improve FPS, look for mods that run overcomplicated scripts each frame and remove them - stuff like that.

And what's wrong with that? 35 - 60 FPS is a respectable framerate for any game, that's the point where the eye sees fluid motion in an animation. There's really no need to try for anything more than what you're already getting. With Oblivion you can go as low as 20 FPS and still get reasonably smooth gameplay. Not to mention that if you have a LCD monitor you're not going to get anymore than 60 FPS anyway. That's the standard refresh rate of those kinds of monitors, and you can't display any FPS higher than what your refresh rate is set to. And it's not just the hardware that's putting limits on your performance, but the game engine itself. You can have the most powerful system on earth and you still won't get much better than you already are now. It's simply not a very efficient engine. If you've already PyFFI'd your meshes, that's about as optimized as you can get them. Mods like Oblivion Polygon Overhaul and Operation Optimization really aren't going to help all that much. They both deal with so few meshes in the game that their impact is going to be minimal at best.

Uhh, what? No. The chances of scripts being the cause of performance loss is ridiculously negligible. If your CPU is the bottleneck (relatively unlikely), then AI is far more likely to cause problems than scripts - before you worry about any script-heavy mods, make sure you've eliminated any sources of large crowds of NPCs - as these are far more likely to cause slowdown.

In Oblivion, far and away the greatest source of performance loss is graphics-heavy mods - mostly high-res texture packs, though very-high-poly models can also slow things down (usually very-high-poly models are unique and therefore unlikely to cause a big slowdown by themselves, but if you have a bunch of them at once it can certainly have an impact - though with the various texture mapping that Oblivion uses, there's very little need to use very-high-poly models in the first place). A distant second is large clumps of NPCs. Everything beyond that is negligible by comparison, most of the time.

Obviously, a buggy script can slow things down dramatically - but assuming you have a bit of quality control in your mod selection process (i.e. choosing mods that at least look like they've been given adequate effort and thought), you probably won't run into those - since even basic testing should reveal most bugs of that sort (and the impact would be quite significant, since we're talking about needless looping). But seriously, for the most part, to get scripts to slow down your game, you have to be trying. I know, because I've run quite a few tests myself, and furthermore have read dozens of various tests by various modders (hrmn and haama probably did most of them) - scripts do not cause significant slowdown in almost all cases. There's something of a brick wall effect - where scripts cause almost no loss of performance until a certain point, after which performance is lost very, very quickly. However, like I said - you pretty much have to be trying to hit it.

35-60 FPS are damn good for Oblivion!

Are you using http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1140777-relz-oblivion-stutter-remover/?

I have a GTX 480 and I get 60 everywhere. Even Imperial City Market.

This is currently without any mods.

To get to 60 everywhere, I had to overclock my Core i7 860 from 2.8GHz to 3.8GHz. The problem was in cities where a lot of NPCs are present. My bottleneck was the CPU for those conditions.

Without any overclock, I still get 45 in the most intense places.

Are you using 4gb patch and QTP3?

Anyway, an unmodded game creating cpu-dependant slowdowns to an i7 would be scary

Yes, I'm using OSR. I don't know what my max FPS would be without OSR. I have my FPS capped at 60; my monitors refresh rate.
A combination of OSR and an SSD and I get virtually no stuttering. That's one thing I do like.



I have my 2 480's overclocked as well as my CPU. GPU's are at 830/1660/1978 from the stock clock of 700/1401/1848. CPU is 3406MHz from the stock clock of 2666MHz.
I have a heavily modded game though. QTPIII, AmpolX's textures, plus other various texture replacers; 177 ESM/ESP's; Really AEVWD full installation, etc.

Stupid question by my side since your OSR usage was clear by an above post..

Anyway, props for your kickass rig

Any attempts to increase FPS at this point in time would be futile if you've already PyFFI'd your meshes BSA. Don't forget this one simple fact:

Oblivion is a game from 2006, it is four years old, and the engine is not designed to handle the graphics expected of a game made today. You have passed the point where FPS slowdowns are caused by bad hardware and are now deep into the territory of FPS loss due to lack of engine optimization. If you want to get FPS back, you're going to need to start removing heavyweight mods. So far, I've stopped using QTP3, replacing it with MTGR's textures and removed Wilderness Architecture from RAEVWD (although I might make up for that by putting in the less heavy-hitting Fort Ruins, mostly because I've got so many mods adding to my DistantLOD that full RAEVWD is no longer necessary), not because my rig can't handle it, but because the GAME can't.

Don't forget, all the mods in the world will not stop this game from being old, and the engine from being obsolete.

To answer OP, many of the meshes in OPO also have deformed UV mapping due to reducing poly-count without manually fixing the UV map. What this means is you get very skewed textures on many of the rocks, even more skewed than vanilla. Plus you get many sharp angles on the rocks that look noticeably bad in-game.

Long ago I corrected a number of these UV errors but gave up since OPO gave me very little performance boost.

Anyway, I have thought about fixing many of the vanilla UV map errors on the most common rocks. I don't think the UOP fixes this. Maybe I'll do that one day.

I guess you're right. Hardware isn't my problem. I have a solid mid-range system. And this game only needs a low end system by today's standards to run well for a vanilla game.




I hope you do fix the vanilla UV maps.

Okay, well I've heard it from people who know better than I do. I'll stay far away from OPO.

Completely unmodded. lol It's scary indeed.

And when I add Antialising and Anisotropic Filtering, my fps get's higher. :unsure:

But in general, I am always at 60 (V sync).

dude i wish i got anywhere near 30 FPS! i usually deal with 15 best
and as said before PyFFI is much better than OPO

Are you on a heavily modded game?

I wasn't sure about OPO, but after reading what some of the modding guru's here have said about it, I'm staying away. PyFFI really helps.

nope, 40 mods at max. Most are armor/weapon mods as well. I just have a crappy pc

Y'know what's funny... the main thing that impresses me about this thread is the number of people who realize that activating VSync is a good idea, rather than poo-poo'ing it as a framerate killer. Is public awareness finally improving?

(There would be a rant here about script efficiency, but DW beat me to it.)

Holy crap, and you're complaining that you're getting a framerate of 35 - 60? That's damn good considering what you're running there. :shakehead:

Not really. Oblivion is not using much more than just a single core. While it's supposed to be able to handle dual-cores, it does it quite badly, and it doesn't have a clue how to deal with quads. So your processor is only as good as a single core goes as far as the game is concerned. That's one of the limitations of the game engine that's been mentioned. A faster multi-core processor does not mean better performance.

I know. You're right.

Someone know if the Engine really improved on that basis for Fallout 3?

VSync isn't all that good. Just prevents screen tearing.



I guess... I was hoping for 60 FPS minimum when I bought my cards. But it's like someone said, Oblivion just isn't optimized for modern cards. Neither is 3DMark06 for that matter. I score lower in 3DMark with 2 GTX 480's than I did with one 280.

I don't use VSync either, I know what its for, I just don't like my framerate being limited very much.

Oh, and as for me, my game is capped at 30FPS in OSR. Why not 60, you might ask? Well, I really don't see too much reason in going over 30FPS if this game is heavily modded (like mine, with 180 total plugins, 133 of which are loaded, and numerous replacers), to me my FPS cap is an estimate of the ideal FPS I should get with the degree of modification I've placed on the game, so I cap at 30; no reason to go over, as IMHO that can lead to unreasonable expectations. 30 FPS heavily modded is excellent, and although I can go higher, I choose not to.

"Just?" If you find screen tearing to be less noticeable than a fractional framerate drop, you're probably not actually looking at the screen.