I just purchased the Oblivion GotY edition off of Steam, after somehow losing my discs for the original game. The game itself runs very smoothly on even the highest settings (no lag, juddering, etc.), but will occasionally crash upon loading new cells or previous save files. I tried lowering draw distances and resolution within the game, but this does not seem to help. My theory is that my GPU is being over-stressed and therefore crashes the game, because the crashes usually happen after I have been playing for an hour or more. However, I can run many other graphics-intensive games (Mass Effect 2, Fallout 3, Dragon Age, BF:BC2) at high settings with no or few problems. My computer is not that high-end, and I have some dated hardware in it, but I upgraded it around the time I first purchased Oblivion (2008), and the game ran with no problems then. My system specs are as follows:

Intel Pentium 4 2.80GHz processor
2.5 GB RAM
512 MB video RAM
nVidia 7600 GS video card


Any and all help would be greatly appreciated; the game crashes way too frequently to be playable right now.

Thanks!

First of all make sure all your drivers are up to date. Second of all disable auto save on rest/travel etc. they make the game crash.

If you believe you are overstressing the GPU you might want to check the temperature while gaming. High stress means high temperature I believe. Tough I doubt this could be the only cause.

Furthermore I believe Oblivion just crashes randomly and is never 100% stable. For me upgrading from windows vista to windows 7 helped alot but still every 2/3 hour the game simply crashes.

I updated my drivers yesterday, as I thought that might have been an issue, though nothing seems to have come from it. I didn't know that autosaving caused crashes, so I guess I'll disable that and see what happens. I'm running XP, so I don't think that the OS is much of a problem either, but it's good, or at least reassuring, to know that I'm not the only one whose game crashes repeatedly.

Thanks for the help!

How often does your game crash btw? Is it like every 10 minutes or even less?

There are also a couple of mods which aim to prevent crashes.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=22282

and

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=10400

The first aims to prevent crashes when they happen (requires OBSE tough, just search for 'OBSE Oblivion' on google and you will find it) and the second makes sure unused memory buffers are cleared so Oblivion doesn't run of of memory (which would crash it I assume).

Also let me know if disabling autosaving helps

And no problem for helping I know the horror of not knowing what is making Oblivion crash.