Hi,

I've been working recently to build up a full modded Oblivion setup, and ran across an unexpected issue. Using things such as FCOM, QTP3R, etc my RAM usage is obviously high, but after adding several quest mods such as The Lost Spires and The Ayleid Steps, along with several others, my RAM usage increased a further 200-400 MB on average, including in areas that seemed to have nothing to do with any of these mods. I can post more details later if needed, but the main point is to ask if there's some packaging method which results in less RAM usage than others. I.E. besides simply removing mods, will it reduce RAM usage to:

- Merge ESPs together?
- Unpack BSAs into loose files?
- Pack loose files into BSAs?

I'm already using Streamline & OSR, etc. This isn't an issue of needing further purging so much as reducing standard RAM load.

Merging ESPs together wouldn't really help unless there's some internal structure in the game that eats a set amount of RAM on a per-mod basis. I doubt the different would be anywhere near 400MB though if that was the case.

BSAs vs loose files don't matter. If they did, I'd have long ago been SOL with the 4 ginormous ones I have filled with custom graphics mods. They're streamed by the game as you play and only exist in memory for the cells which have been loaded. Loose files are handled the same way, so I can't see there being a savings there.

Lost Spires and Ayleid Steps are both fairly large quest mods, but I find it hard to believe that just them alone could account for so much extra RAM usage.

My full list of recent additions which resulted in this RAM usage increase is:

Race Balancing Project
The Lost Spires
The Ayleid Steps
Kvatch Rebuilt
Reneer's Guard Overhaul
ImpeREAL Empire: Unique Forts
Imperial City Expanded (the plugin included with Better Cities, which was already running)
Let the People Drink
Vaults of Cyrodiil (Better Cities' version)
Frostcrag Reborn
Battlehorn Castle Enhanced
Glenvar Castle
Lost Paladins of the Divines
AFK Weye
Cyrodiil Travel Services
A Brotherhood Renewed
Bruma Guild Reconstructed

I would have posted the full list earlier, but I was rushed.

While this is a substantial chunk of content, most of it is fairly local/regional stuff, and I was seeing this increased RAM usage consistently across a wide range of areas. I had hoped that some kind of packaging issue was causing extra content to be loaded when not needed. I'll be swapping out Battlehorn Castle Enhanced and possibly Frostcrag Reborn due to excessive bugs, but I doubt either of them could be buggy enough to account for the issue...

Depends, BSAs are compressed and it would take slightly longer for the game to load from them because it would have to decompress them first. Although, if you repackaged the BSAs with fast to no compression that wouldn't be an issue. Even then I doubt that would make much of a difference, and it has more to do with the HDD than the RAM.

I'm monitoring Oblivion's RAM usage using the on-screen display options from ATI Tray Tools, so I'm pretty sure this is a RAM issue. I'd already repacked the stock BSAs with no compression; I should double-check the mod-installed ones at some point, but I haven't got around to it yet and I expect they're probably done without compression already.

Something that doesn't seem widely discussed about repacking the stock BSAs is that I noticed my CPU usage dropped sharply once I did so. Considering how often Oblivion is CPU-bound, I think this aspect should be emphasized more in some of the guides that mention it in passing .

The only reason CPU usage would drop sharply is if you're repacking them uncompressed. It makes a difference, mostly in stutter improvements, but it's never been shown to have more than a small direct impact on the CPU. Perhaps that benefit varies widely. Obviously the less time your CPU has to spend dealing with the BSAs the more time it has to spend on AI. The real killer.