I should have know that the Stutter Remover for Oblivion and Fallout 3 would be different downloads. I read the readme and assumed that OSR and FSR were one and the same. You don't have to combine the two plugins into one, maybe just make it a bit more clear in the readme that FSR and OSR are different downloads to avoid confusion.


Sky Ranger is right, those values don't exist by default in Oblivion's INI file. They have to be added in. I saw them suggested by one user of The Nexus Forums (Nosisab) in a thread where another user asked how he could make Oblivion use every core of his quad core CPU. The thread is http://thenexusforums.com/index.php?showtopic=183530, for anyone interested in the discussion.

It sounded like Nosisab pulled those tweaks from Fallout 3's INI file though. I have not tried those tweaks so I can't say if they make a difference. Though Nosisab did say that the worst that can happen is that Oblivion doesn't read those values.

beside OSR, setting iThreads to 1 was like the best thing I did for my performance.

I'd take Nosisab's with a grain of salt personally. Folks like the OBSE team who have actually dug into the guts of the code would know better if those settings do anything than the guy who is implying he wrote a 3 year old tweaking guide that is mostly useless after the last official game patch.

Gamebryo may well use the settings, but Bethesda has customized their copy of it.

One has Oblivion in the name and the other Fallout...How much clearer can it be?



I have to +1 that . OSBE team actually anolyzed the Oblivion code and knows better than anybody(except the developpers I guess ) what it actually does.

No, no. I mean, there do not appear to be any such settings read by the executable. Just rumor, or possibly settings from older versions of Oblivion.

While iThreads=1 may help a lot in the absence of OSR, it may not help when using OSR, particularly OSR w/ heap replacement. It might even hurt.

By Azura! :ahhh:

So these INI settings are a "no go" if one is using OSR 4.1 with heap 5 and .exe patched like my case? I have a Core i7 on Windows 7 64bits.

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

Thank you for further clarification.

That's unpleasant. How can it hurt exactly? When I don't have iThreads set to 1, i can really... feel the difference in smoothness, it became really important to me, I fell in love and, well... I'm not ready to part with it just yet :[

Really, I don't know exactly what iThreads does. But from the name, I think setting it to 1 reduces the degree of multithreading that Oblivion does. Since vanilla Oblivion suks ("svcks" after "Oblivion" gets censored on this forum atm) at multithreading, that's probably a good thing in the absence of OSR. On the other hand, once OSR has replaced the heap and modified all the critical sections, multithreading doesn't hurt so much. And it does let more CPUs work on things at once, at least during cell transitions and a few other special occasions.
But who knows, maybe it doesn't hurt. I just tried runs at iThreads=1, 3, and 30, and they all looked about the same to me. I'm on a dual core.

Well if YOU don't know, WHO does? :shakehead:
But really,... well... I hope something doesn't get really messed up in my game. I'd rather eat an excrement than to reinstall again.

No offense to you Arthmoor but I don't think this is 100% correct.

First, I don't think Nosisab implied that he wrote Tweakguide.com's Tweak guide.
Next, I found a very interesting line of text at the bottom of page 1: This guide refers to the latest version of Oblivion Version 1.2.0416
It is only really the pages concerning INI tweaks (which total 3 pages) that may be regarded as a bit old, everything else is still relevant and useful even today.
And even on the INI tweaks pages, the second paragraph states that you should only apply a few tweaks at a time and then test. Hence, if certain tweaks don't work or cause problems, you will immediately know that said tweaks won't work. I can imagine that only a few of those INI tweaks are incorrectly stated. A large number of those tweaks would work. One of my favourite tweaks in that guide is fDlgFocus, which controls how far the camera zooms in on an NPC's face in conversation.
And lastly, despite the OBSE team's findings that the multi-threaded tweaks have no effect on the game, there are still some both here and in The Nexus Forums who insist that those tweaks have an effect on their game. It's not conclusive evidence but still...

For all these reasons, I still choose to keep that tweak guide listed in my website of things that will prevent bugs and crashes. Recently though, I did add a warning stating that performance INI tweaks aren't to be used unless the user is willing to test the effects on their game. Maybe you or someone else can commission the OBSE team to create their own INI tweak guide that works properly (I don't think they can improve it much though). Until that happens though, this is about as good as it's going to get.


That is correct. 1 point to you. And 1 to me for making myself look stupid.

@TamaraVico
A bad INI tweak does not require completely reinstalling the game. Worst case scenario is that you completely mess up your INI file and Oblivion refuses to work properly. Solution is to delete your INI file, reapply your game settings then reapply any working INI tweaks you used previously.

None taken, but until someone provides solid evidence to the contrary, I'm going with the guys who anolyze the code and have reported their findings.

Also, I was referring specifically to the multi-threading and memory related stuff that people have played with time and time again that inevitably turns out to do nothing of value. I wasn't referring to stuff like the dialogue focus value or border disabling or forced tree LOD or the shadow map resolution setting or any of that. We weren't discussing those.

I just wanted to answer this. The OBSE team didn't only find that those ini tweaks have no effect on the game, they found that the settings were either not read at all by the engine, or read but never ever used for anything. Thus there are two posibilities:

1: The OBSE team members don't know what they're talking about.
2: Some people are experiencing the placebo effect.

You may think 1 is most likely, but go for 2.

@Arthmoor
I'm inclined to believe the OBSE team as well, mostly because I can't claim to know better. My website has a copy of IanPatt's reply to a post I made about Tweakguide's multi-threaded tweaks kept on the relevant page as an example of non-functional tweaks. So don't worry, I am not accusing you or any member of the OBSE team of being liars.

I see. I guess I took a 3 year old tweaking guide that is mostly useless after the last official game patch as you saying that nearly every piece of information in the guide is useless. Thank you for clearing that up. I am inclined to believing that the multi-threaded tweaks don't work but I haven't seen any discussions which argue that the memory tweaks don't work. Has the OBSE team made any comments about them?

@TheNiceOne
I immediately went for reason 2. That comment I made was closer to something I decided to throw into the mix at the last second. I know all about the OBSE team's findings that all those multi-threaded tweaks don't do anything (except bUseMultiThreadedFaceGen and iNumHavokThreads which appear to do something). In the thread, http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=1071130 (and I know you were lurking on it), I am the one who started that topic and it was to one of my posts that http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?s=&showtopic=1071130&view=findpost&p=15570131 with the information he had about those tweaks not working. It is this reply which I have saved on my website.

Maybe users who say the tweaks did something aren't comepletely experiencing the placebo effect, since there are two tweaks in that bunch which the engine does process after it is read.

@Malonn (below)
That is exactly what I do with my INI file.

I say stick to the default ini for most settings. Seems Bethesda would know what's best (for the most part - changing certain things like the screenshot and local map shader are some exceptions) for the game they coded.

I don't think Bethesda really knows what's best. But at least the default values have been well tested.

You don't think so? I betcha they know more about it than you think. But who knows, maybe their coders were learning stuff as they went. I mean they weren't able to code in HDR and Anti-aliasing at the same time. You're the man though. Maybe you know more about some things than they do.

I don't know what's best either.

Well, who does?

This made me a bit sad to read. It was almost like a superhero loosing there powers and giving up the fight...

Of course you know best, your SkyRanger-1 dude! Even if you don't know, just say you do so we feel better, :lmao: !

No one knows what's best. That's the way the world works.

Anyway, OSR is generally better than no-OSR. As Arthmoor pointed out, reducing uGridDistantCount tends to improve performance. Beyond that, there is a lot of ambiguity.

OSR is better than any other mod aimed at increasing performance in Oblivion. I was having game freezes for whatever reason, and OSR seems to have gotten rid of that after enabling heap replacement.

I have one minor issue however. The game runs much more smoothly with the fps management on, outdoors it works just fine for the most part at 30 fps. I often get 60+ fps in some areas, dips to the 15's when i'm looking towards the IC. However, in indoor situations I typically get over 150+ fps. Problem is, the fps management seems to turn off Vsync, which in turn is quite annoying in any indoor cell as I get massive screen tearing. I tried setting the fps management setting to 60 fps (my screens refresh rate) from the default 30 fps but still got some pretty bad screen tearing.

Can Vsync be used with the fps management portion of OSR in any way? Is there any way to eliminate screen tearing from within the OSR .ini perhaps?

I seem to get much smoother overall performance with the fps management on, which is great, I would experience some 2 second stutters quite often when using just Vsync + triple buffering and turning from a high fps area and turning around and having my fps drop dramatically would cause some pretty bad stuttering/micro freezes.

Does anyone know of a way (I don't know exactly how this would work, some 3rd party program, or more likely I would think it would have to be some sort of script or mod for Oblivion) to have Vsync only applied in indoor cells and switched off in exterior cells? Unlikely I would think, but who knows!

Thanks

-J

Lets not forget the iShadowMapResolution setting that they "knew best" would work at 256 but crashes the game instead for a lot of people. Very clearly wrong, but it's in there by default if your game is patched to the latest official version.

It's the memory and multi-threading stuff that nobody really knows best about. Even things like raising the buffer sizes that people swear up and down makes things better usually end up being the result of placebo.

I've yet to find any concrete evidence of those settings making life better but I have seen plenty of posts scattered around the forums where people say it made things worse because the game crashed sooner.

Quite the contrast with OSR though. That has a very clear and visible effect on the game. Even if you don't use a heap replacement. Capping the FPS all by itself is enough to eliminate most of the problems people have. It's something I've said before, but Oblivion was never intended to be a 60fps combat shooter that never dropped below 45.

@Jamrock990: It's funny, because I was just about to come by and ask if there was any way for OSR to suspend it's FPS management indoors to produce better frame rates in dungeons. In my experience indoor stutter never existed so it might be nice to burn the extra cycles on video rendering there.

Also as a side note it's interesting to observe that if you go to the Shivering Isles, most if not all of the problems with the game go away even without OSR. I spent a 5 hour session there yesterday just running around before realizing it had actually been that long. The second I came back to Cyrodiil though, blam, down she went.

OSR shouldn't interact with vsync much, if at all. All the FPS management does is insert delays and effectively modify iFPSClamp. Does setting MaximumFPS to 0 prevent your screen tearing? Does setting bAllowSlowMotion to 0 prevent your screen tearing?

I believe setting MaximumFPS to 0 solved the screen tearing issue, but I only had a small amount of time to test. Is the FPS management system still working effectively with MaxFPS set to 0?

That implies that your vsync is working strangely. How are you enabling vsync? What is iPresentInterval in your Oblivion.ini?

Changing MaximumFPS to 0 will, as the setting name implies, disable the upper limit on your FPS that OSR applies. The lower limit on frames-per-in-game-second will still apply, as will the other settings in the FPS management section of OSRs configuration file.

If VSync is enabled and your drivers are sane and Oblivion isn't going crazy then MaximumFPS should have no impact on whether or not you get screen tearing.