Fallout 3 also has rather less demanding LOD, trees, grass, and so forth, unless I am much mistaken. And it does use (fundamentally) the same engine, after all.

From all that I have read and seen, it would seem that, indeed, only a dual-core processor will offer - somewhat - better performance than a single-core processor, for Oblivion, all else being equal. Nothing beyond that is actually advantageous, unless you happen to be running other things in the background at the same time. And frankly, that is not the most wise course of action anyway, generally speaking.

I say this as a proud and happy owner of a homemade quad-core (Sandy Bridge) PC, incidentally. The main reason I opted for Sandy Bridge is their superb individual core performance. An i3 would do just as well - if clocked as high! - as my i5, I have no doubts whatsoever. Experience and observation has borne this out, suffice it to say.

So, if anyone should be in the market for a gaming PC, for playing Oblivion on and not much else, I would suggest not bothering with four or more cores, hyperthreading, or anything else like that. You might end up sorely disappointed with the lack of impact from such.

Fallout 3 actually has more LOD than Oblivion has, it's just handled a lot better. It's the same engine, but Fallout's is a lot more advanced, they seem to have optimised NPCs a lot better, and added occlusion and stuff means that a lot less stuff is rendered unless needed. If Skyrim has that then we can expect a seizable performance increase from Oblivion.

Ah. Well, it just goes to show the value of hearsay! Hehe.

I stand corrected, on that count.

Yeah, Fallout 3 and New Vegas look and perform much better on my quad-core system than Oblivion. And i bet Skyrim will too.

Even if Beth wanted to, they would never be able to release it because of their use of so much middleware.

I have noticed a substantial boost in performance upgrading to i7. This might be purely anecdotal and I'm sure that all the fancy new Core i7 features are helping, not that it has anything to do with multi-core specifically or that I have any real knowledge on the matter.

Just saying, if you are thinking of upgrading CPU, there is performance boost to be gained from going from Core 2 Duo to Core i7/i9.

Better CPU architecture means that the processor can get things done faster/more efficiently. A 3.0GHz Pentium Four is not the same as a 3.0GHz i7 2600k, even if they had the same number of cores.

Yes, the i7s have been noted to perform very well with Oblivion. The reason is a feature they include which will automatically boost the clockrate on a single core if the system notices that it's under a CPU-intensive load which can't use multiple cores. That's exactly the scenario for Oblivion. I think some (or all?) i5s might have the same feature.

Edit: Architectural improvements certainly don't hurt either, as noted above.

Edit: Gah, my first accidental double post... :sadvaultboy:

That reason alone is not the only one. Turbo Boost basically automatically Overclocks the processor. The good thing about i7s is that, compared to older processors, they're relatively easy to overclock provided you have adequate cooling. However, anyone can overclock their processor manually. I have a core 2 duo at 4.0GHz and an i7 2600k at 4.8GHz. It was a pita getting that Core 2 Duo to stay stable, but the i7 matched it and went beyond within minutes. Newer chips can (usually) be overclocked much higher, and that's one venue for better performance.

Don't OBSE DLLs have the potential to run their own processes?

Aside from that, the highest I have EVER seen oblivion.exe running at is 31% (average is 25.3%). My guess is that the executable sends some non-vital requests to a second process. Like most games of its time, this was probably there for HyperThreading purposes so that the game logic wouldn't have to wait for some of the things it didn't need. It is there for easing the delay between instruction segments, not for offloading one core component onto another process. The things like threaded Audio, Havok, and the like are not independent, thus they have to run through the same process. The time when Oblivion benefits from a second core are very brief.

Fallout 3 was a massive improvement in performance over Oblivion, and that was just a 2 year difference in time. Even when trying to bog it down with ultra-high res textures, FO3 takes it like a champ.

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Again, you're mistaken. It doesn't show Oblivion's using all cores. It shows Oblivion uses one core, which windows then tries its best to divide somewhat amongst the cores. That's completely, completely different to using more than one core.