I might have tried to set that high a long time ago, but I think maybe the hardcoded limit isn't much higher than the defaults (max settings), which I stick close to. I could be wrong about that, but I've always thought of uGridsDistantCount in terms of being able to lower it for an improvement, rather than being able to kill your framerate by boosting it like uGridsToLoad. But that's kind of semantical ~

As has been said, it's not hardware limitations you're up against. It's a crappy engine. One that simply can't handle being turned up to insane levels like you're wanting to do. I think you should probably reset your ini file back to vanilla first of all, and then tweak downward, NOT upward, from there.

[Display]
fGrassStartFadeDistance=46000.0
fGrassEndDistance=47000.0
fFarDistance=50000.0000
fShadowLOD2=4100.0000
fShadowLOD1=1200.0000
fLightLOD2=6500.0000
fLightLOD1=6000.0000
fEnvMapLOD2=4800.0000
fEnvMapLOD1=4500.0000

[LOD]
fLodDistance=35500.0000

[Grass]
fGrassEndDistance=18000.0000
fGrassStartFadeDistance=17000.0000

No idea what exactly all those do I just edited the ones that looked like they'd tweak what I wanted. Also, the values are based entirely on my experience installing DR6. He states editing the fNearDistance value to 0(4 for me) will allow no visual clipping. If 10units are so small as to change that then 50000 units didn't seem to be that much of a distance. So, I'm a noob, tell me how wrong I am so I can correct some mistakes? help, plz.

For starters, http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_1.html It will tell you what most of the basic graphics tweaks and INI stuff does. The usage advice is a bit off in places, but it will at least tell you what things are for.

If you have indeed increased the uGridDistantCount and uGridDistantTreeRange, than you are asking for trouble. If you are just running with all of the view distance sliders in the Video options maxed out, that won't hurt things much.

The best advice I can give at this point is that you seem to be unsure as to what tweaks you have made to the INI, which essentially means "get rid of it and start over." NEVER alter the INI without solid knowledge as to what you are doing, EVER. Don't just edit some setting manually because a mod told you, make sure you know exactly what you are doing and what the results will be before making an INI tweak.

Well, I installed QTP3 Redimized and gained about 3 fps. Reseting my config file gave me 4-5fps extra. After increasing view distances, fades, shadowing in the IG menu to max I only had a 1-2fps gain over previous .ini and 100 more free vram.


My uGridDistanceCount was at the default 25, changing it to 16 was the first step I tried in this thread, Tree count is also at 16. Tomorrow I"ll fool around tweaking different things while monitoring memory/cpu/gpu to get a more, thorough, idea of how things are impacting performance.

I was afraid it was just the engine that was limiting performance, a bit obvious considering there's a gig of free ram and processing isn't being fully used, but I was trying not to entertain this in the hope that there might have been a straightforward solution to this problem. The most I suppose I can hope for atm is to find a way to squeeze enough performance out of it to get a stable 24-30fps so that motion is at least fluid.

Actually no, don't read that Tweak guide. It's filled with useless information that no longer applies. Wish people would stop linking to it like it means anything now



Useless to raise this much past 12000, but you're not doing yourself any favors with it being so high. Max it in the in-game options sliders, but don't force it past that manually.

fFarDistance=50000.0000 - As far as I know, useless.
fLodDistance=35500.0000 - Same here.

If you've got other similar ill-advised tweaks going on, it's really best to revert to the vanilla file. After the 1.2.0416 patch the default really is pretty well optimized already.

I've always exercised caution when editing the INI. I would peform a small edit of the value and load oblivion to see any changes, then continue raising the value till seeing any drastic changes, then selecting a value that seems suitable. Other than the above changes I listed the only other change done was to iShadowMapResolution=2048 to have self shadowing that was decent. That had no impact on fps after changing it. Thank you for the link though....er just read your post, will disregard it then.

Also, when adjusting values in the ini that do show results, consider what your goals are aesthetics-wise; it's not always worth it to set everything really high when you're not going to notice the results. For example, I set the distance for lights to a crazy value because I wanted to be able to look from one end of Anvil from another and see the steet lights illuminating the surroundings. I want to be able to see torches and other lights from far away in the wilderness. But even this choice isn't a natural one, because the performance hit is not really worth it and having high values for things like lighting and specular can introduce visual glitches on distant object. But the same stuff applies to grass, it's going to fade into view unnaturally no matter what, how much does it matter to you that the distance that happens at is farther away? Or, is it really worth the overall performance impact to be able to see as far as possible with uGridsDistantCount during the occasional times you're around the Imperial City or up in the mountains? Bigger is only better if it matters to you, I guess.

If it hasn't been mentioned, keep in mind that having a lot of mods will almost always inevitably reduce performance, with all of the scripts running especially.

As suggested I would kind of just run around for a bit and take note of the circumstances your performance drops most (and keep the debug text on screen using the "tdt" command to watch your vram usage). It's been mentioned that lots of NPCs can bog things down significantly, but for me there are places like the IC harbor area that unavoidably crush my framerate. There's a lot of variability.

EDIT: Increasing iShadowMapResolution will definitely eat up your vram--take a look at the number next to the S in the vram usage area of the debug text. I was playing around and increased it to 4096 but then immediately forgot about it, only to be baffled when my vram usage went above 2gb, before I noticed the number next to the S and set it back to 1024.

I agree with what you're saying. For me landscapes are an important aesthetic. The only reason I started really fooling around in the INI was to increase the distance at which I can see the grass. Anyways, I tried out the shadow edit and it does eat up vram. Going from 2048 to 1024 was 100MB. Had 0 impact in fps unfortunately .

Yeah vram usage doesn't really affect framerate. What I experienced when I still had a 1gb card (and when I set iShadowMapResolution to 4096 on my 2gb one) was just extreme stuttering. It can be interpreted as a drop in framerate, because you're still ending up with a slideshow sometimes, but it's a different issue. Also increased crashing is another result of texture memory overload. I should know since I would occasionally encounter situations where the game was trying to use 1200+ mb on my 1gb card and the results weren't pretty.

What I experienced probing the issue is probably similar to what you've been reporting with disabling things or resetting the ini giving you a 2-3 fps boost here and there but nothing substantial. It seems to me that, aside from certain things like RAEVWD and situations with many NPCs or lights, it's just the combined contribution of various mods and tweaks that bring one's framerate down in a major way. If you're anything like me the compulsion is to find a single bottleneck so you can solve that problem and get a substantial performance increase, but the reality is that it's just not going to happen that way. And ask anyone who upgraded their system to a 2010-2011 top-of-the-line boss rig about the disappointment upon running Oblivion and finding the performance increase was just so-so. The game will always beat you!