As my sig says, I play Oblivion on a MacBook Pro via BootCamp. I run FRAPS all the time so I have a good idea what the general frame rate is. Also, I run Sky Rangers OSR, which caps my FPS at 30. Some baselines:
Interior cells, day or night: 28-30.
Exterior cells, sunny day: 20-28.
Exterior cells, raining: maybe down a couple?
My FPS drops in Better Cities, sometimes to single digits. Sometimes, outside, it will drop lower if there's a lot of NPCs around, down to anywhere from 12-20. But the game is always playable.
Still, as I played and got deeper into the game, I noticed two problems. The first one occurred every little bit, with my FPS rate dropping down to single digits. It took me a bit but I finally realized it was from the animations associated with Realistic Fatigue - the throbbing screen. Easy fix, remove the mod.
The second problem is more problematic: Whenever I cast a summon scamp spell, my FPS drops to 7 or 8. Every time. At first, I thought it was magical effects, but I can cast starlight, healing, summon skeletons and with a baseline of 20-23, the FPS might drop to 17. Or not. But with Summon Scamps, which arrive with that red, kind of flaming animation, it always drops.
What finally clued me in was when I was fighting a Dumner bandit and he cast "Ancestor Ghost". The AG has the same animation! Sure enough, for the duration the ghost was on the screen - and my character was looking at it - my FPS dropped to 7-8.
I'm curious if anyone else has had this problem and if they found a solution.
~ Dani ~
