I'm trying to get as many frames as possible with my new build of oblivion. No graphics mods and as little extra scripts running in the background as possible. But I need an overhaul because I can't deal with Vanilla Oblivion. Thus my question. Thanks in advance.

If performance is an issue then it's a straight choice between WarCry and TIE.

Thats what I was thinking but I wasn't positive. How much would TIE impact the game's performance by the way?

TIE's impact should be minimal since it adds no resources at all to the game. I can't give you numbers, but I can describe what I've seen in the sixteen hours I've played it:

The number of people on the streets in cities is moderately increased, because there are more (and more types of) guards, as well as some adventurers of many types who wander about. A very small number of objects have been placed in the world, at least so far as I have noticed, which all have important functions: Secret entrances/exits, sewer accesses, hideouts for the player, etc. As long as you don't start fights in cities the impact of these city changes should be small. The author showed restraint and didn't overdo it with a bunch of unnecessary folks on the streets.

The number of people inside taverns and guilds is greatly increased. I often walk in and find six different people all chatting it up, and sometimes two or three in side rooms, and taverns are really noisy places now. Some items have been added to both guilds and castles. There is probably an associated performance drop in these public places, but it has not been noticeable for me.

In private cells, homes and the like, there should be no performance change.

There are more people on the roads, but fewer monsters. There are fewer monsters in external cells everywhere, in fact. Out-of-doors, this probably amounts to a performance increase in most areas.

I can't speak to the content of dungeons, as my level two character has backed out of almost every one upon seeing an ogre or ghost in the foyer.

The maker of TIE made a few efforts to improve performance by (for example) getting rid of footstep sound files (or, replacing them with zero-length files, rather) for most of the smaller animals, such as deer, small boars, and feral dogs. This has meant, in practice, that packs of feral dogs have sneaked up on me twice, to my chagrin.

Hope this helps,
Asterai

TIE will have some impact due to the additional NPCs and the AI packs they carry, along with a few extra spawn points. Beyond that, it's impact is negligible because it only leverages assets the game already has.

Thanks guys I appreciate it. Looks like I'll be trying out TIE with a new character; hopefully it'll be to my liking. If not, back to Francesco's I suppose.

And another + 1 for TIE from myself (a bit late considering you already made up your mind). I run it on my laptop Core 2 Duo and mobile Gforce 8600 (256mb) and 4g ram (best of the two machines we have) and an old desktop AMD Athlon 3400 (yep single core) and GForce 7300 (512mb) old AGP interface, and 2g ram.

Admittedly I use OSR on the laptop and OSR + Streamline on the desktop, but not because of TIE, I have a fair few other mods installed making these necessary.

TIE will also add a bit more wildlife out in the country, but again as mentioned above reference NPC it has been done conservatively. (PS if you use Wrye Bash tweaks 'As intended Bores' and 'As intended Imps' .... respect the pig, they can be a menace in the early game)

Should you later decide you want to look into graphic replacers which will not give extra load on your machine, I can highly recommend CorePCs Vibrant replacers, bit of a long winded installation but they are the same resolution as vanilla (I am pretty sure he mentions in some cases these will actually be better for performance), the only ones that are bigger have an equivalent normal resolution version.

Anyway going off topic - Good luck getting out of the sewers