I've recently installed Better Cities, and the results in Cheyendhal combined with QTP3R is amazing. It's so gorgeous that I am loathe to uninstall any of it -- despite the fact that when I walk through Cheyendhal it stutters like mad!

So, I'd rather take the "fix the computer, not the game" approach to fixing this problem. Unfortunately, I'm not quite sure what is the most likely cause of the slowdown. It mostly occurs when I look down on a long stretch (Cheyendhal is a big cell, so I don't think the normal wilderness view distances apply) -- but I'm not sure what to make of that. It could be the CPU is trying to handle keeping track of / script-running on too many objects, or it could be that the GPU can't keep up or I don't have enough VRAM to satisfy the GPU (only 512 MB after all). Is there any way, any tool, to properly diagnose the issue?

Type "TDT" in the console. Use the scroll lock button to cycle through the information until you get to a feedback text that shows the amount of VRAM being used. If it is using all your VRAM, then there will be stuttering as the card cycles data through the RAM. Your GPU is the main limiting factor for BBC, as it adds lots of new information to render.

That's incredible, I had no idea I could use Scroll Lock to toggle through all that information. I'm assuming "texture memory" is referring to desired VRAM and, if so...sigh. Looks like fixing this is the more expensive upgrade, not the cheap $20 upgrade.

Thanks for the help! No idea I could access that kind of information from in-game.

What do your system specs look like?

Not terribly interesting. Intel E8400 (probably the best processor they ever made), Radeon HD4850 (the earlier 512 MB version), 4 GB of DDR2 RAM.

I double checked and the texture memory usage was actually remaining pretty constant, but the amount of geometry to render was spiking up past 3000 or so (I'm not sure what the unit is, I doubt it's "triangles") when my FPS started to svck. Maybe that cheap $20 upgrade can help after all.

What cheap $20 upgrade would that be?

Got a real soundcard? What operating system?

Sometime over the holidays, there was a Radeon HD4850 sale (old-style of the card I think) for $20. Video card sales have a tendency to repeat; I can just pop it in my computer in Crossfire with the current one and get some additional rendering power.


Respectively: no, Windows 7. It's definitely the lack of rendering power that's slowing me down; though I'm close to hitting my VRAM ceiling too.

Adding an additional vid card isn't going to help you. I suspect your CPU is the bottleneck. For a quick and easy performance boost, disable music in the oblivion.ini located in my games\oblivion. Find the setting:

bmusicenabled=1

change the one to a zero, save and exit. Try the game again.

That did absolutely nothing. Given that I only have framerate issues when the number of triangles shoots up dramatically. I strongly suspect it's a lack rendering power.

Just out of idle curiosity, what driver version are you using for your vid card?

I'm using Catalyst 10.11.

See if rolling your drivers back to 10.4, or 10.6 gives any improvement. I seem to recall reading that the newer drivers were somewhat borked......

It's quite a bit of work, but pyffing your vanilla and qtp3 meshes may help by cutting down on the overall number of triangles that need to be rendered. (I think Better Cities is already Pyffied). Also, better cities includes optional FPS patches, make sure you have installed them.

Yes. PyFFI'ing your meshes helps tremendously. But you must expect low FPS in cities when running Better Cities. I have 2 GTX 480's in SLI and get 10 - 12 (or so -- a little more, a little less) FPS in cities.

You could always try Oblivion.ini tweaks as an alternate approach (though be careful--always make a backup copy first!)
Lowering the uGridDistant settings - which lowers the number of trees drawn in the distance - improved the stuttering in my game tremendously. But my computer is much less powerful than yours; you may see little difference.