I'm running Oblivion on a relatively high-spec machine (i5 2500K, 8GB RAM. nVidia 560 Ti) and even with a lot of mods, I get a constant 60fps in most places, even with all graphics settings on ultra high.

However, in the Imperial City, mainly the market and the dockside, frame rates plummet. I can't tell if it's due to the number of NPCs or the textures used in the city, or something else entirely. Any help appreciated,

P.

Those two areas are hotspots for bad performance. They perform like crap even with vanilla unmodded Oblivion on my computer (i7 920, nvidiga GTX460). 60 FPS everywhere (most), but 50-ish FPS at the Waterfront District.

That's normal for Oblivion. There's a lot going on in those areas. You can only minimize it, you can't get rid of it.

Oblivion Stutter Remover helps as does optimizing the meshes.

Cheers. Damn shame. Hopefully it resolves itself once we have quantum computers.

I have Oblivion Stutter Remover installed but I'll certain give optimising meshes a go (already have Low Poly Grass but obviously that's no help there...)

P.

Nope, won't help. Oblivion was programmed for a single core CPU. It would need to be rewritten completely to take advantage of quantum computers. The big thing with Oblivion is the clock speed of the CPU. It was designed for a Pentium 4.