I know Oblivion has a reputation for poor PC memory performance, right out of the box. I also know that it doesn't take advantage of quad processors. I just bought a new http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macbook_pro:

2.66 GHz Intel QuadCore i7
4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 Ram
500GB Serial ATA Drive @ 7200 rpm
NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M 512 mb

I installed Oblivion via Bootcamp, using Windows XP, with a Windows partition drive of 120 gb. I'm trying to get the best performance I can before I start adding mods.

Currently, I'm just running Oblivion and Bethesda's content (SI, KotN, DLC). These are uncleaned and unedited. Before I start cleaning and adding performance enhancing mods (Streamline, OSR), I want to get my performance as high as possible.

Currently, these are examples of some of my "hesitation" experiences:

(1) In the chargen dungeon, the first "rat" attack. The two rats jump at my character and I swing my sword ... and my machine hesitates or seems to lag. It definitely slows down. But it's not FPS, because my FPS is still hovering around 50+? Is this a game feature? It seems a bit different from when a Goblin is hacking away at me and I can't swing because I'm recoiling.

(2) Sometimes when I cross exterior cells, the machine will stutter or hang.

Exterior cells I'm getting 20-30+ FPS. Interiors are 50-60. I have anti-alaising turned off in game and I'm running it through my graphics card, with the AA an AS Filter settings at 16x. I want to preserve graphics but increase performance as much as possible. I've read that there are some adjustments to threading that will increase performance.

With this setup and background, what are some .ini adjustments or other settings that I can take advantage of to maximize performance without losing graphic quality, before I start adding graphic enhancement and performance mods?

Also, why does this happen? What makes Oblivion stutter like this, when my other games do not? Just for my own understanding ...

Thanks for any suggestions.

~ Dani ~

Definitely have a look at this guide: http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_1.html especially the advanced tweaking.

I also have a Quadcore i7, but I have a AMD HD5970. When I play the game unmodded, I'm able to max the settings @ 1600x1200 with generally no hiccups or lag. Having several mods (100+) will cause your PC to read more data, and since this game is not optimized to use multi-cores, the best way to make the game run smoother would be to overclock your processor to 3Ghz or faster, which I don't know how to do yet... You could also get a Solid state drive, but I don't know exactly what the difference would be, I just hear everything loads faster.

I honestly don't know why the first rat attack would cause stuttering. I've never encountered that.

Your best bet is to read that tweak guide I referenced. It has ini tweaks to use more ram which you have plenty of. And that should get rid of most of the stuttering when entering new exterior cells.

The first rat attack doesn't really stutter so much as ... slow down. It's like watching the game in slo-mo. Could it be sound card issue?

I'll definitely look at the tweaks.

~ Dani ~

Do you have onboard sound? Disabling music in the .ini can be a major performance boost if you do. Some of the stutter that you see when going into combat, is the music changing from the explore music, to the battle music.

Stutters outside at cell boundaries are normal, and basically unavoidable..... you can reduce how 'apparent' they are, buy using Oblivion Stutter Remover, and capping your framerate at like 30. What you are seeing is oblivion stirring the harddrive, loading the new cells.

The game engine is poorly optimized, does not use multicores, or, multiple video cards worth beans. It is slightly improved with Fallout 3.... but, that doesn't really help you much.

Sound is definitely onboard. I will disable music in the .ini.

Edit: That helped with some of the combat stutter, but there is still a bit. And what I thought was slo-mo is definitely stutter. The game will just hang for a half a second, the FPS dropping fron 50-60 to 12-18, then immediately back up again. This occurs even with music disabled. It does seem to effect combat with Goblins, Rats (because some of my saves are in the CharGen dungeon) but not the Arena for some reason.

I tried lowering the iMaxImpactSoundCount=32 down to 24, but I'm not noticing a difference and that momentary hesitation is still there.

~ Dani ~

Another fix you may want to pick up on, is Quiet Feet Max. Or one of the other derivatives. Do a search for 'quiet feet' at Nexus. Thing is, four footed creatures have a sound for each individual footstep. With onboard sound, that is a lotta load. If there is more than one four-footed beastie.... it gets really rude.

Thanks. I've used that before and I'll make sure I install it. What about AA (antialiasing) and AS (antisotropic) filter settings? Would they have an effect on combat? When I'm not in combat, everything is fine.

Thanks.

~ Dani ~

Its more AI (the game trying to run the npc's) that beats up your performance. The more NPC's on the screen, the worse your performance will be. (or, possibly, even 'in the area') One thing you can do is, streamline the O/S. XP has a fair few services that run that you don't really need, and they contribute nothing to your gaming experience. Well, maybe a bit of frustration... but, personally, I try and avoid that.... Check out http://www.blackviper.com/ website, go to the tweak guide for your O/S, and kill off some of the stuff you don't really need. See how that affects things.

There are also programs like http://www.iobit.com/gamebooster.html that stop background processes while you are playing games. Not sure how much this would actually do, but every little bit helps, right? You can also use it to defrag individual game directories which might be useful after installing large mods or texture replacers.

Thanks everyone. I installed Streamline, OSR, and Quiet&Whisper Feet Max. That seems to help quite a bit. Now I'm running right at a steady 30 FPS (OSR's cap) everywhere but exterior cells, where I'm getting 20-28 without stutter. I can run across Cyrodill now without any stuttering - with FCOM installed.

Now for some other mods ...

Thanks again for your help.

~ Dani ~

I have an i7 860 and a gtx 460 and occasionally the game will stutter when I am assuming it is loading things in to ram. I've done all the tweaks and tweakguides and I think it helped, but didn't eliminate stuttering. Fallout 3 doesn't appear to suffer from this as much, so I was doing some messing around and comparing the fallout3prefs.ini and oblivion.ini. There are a couple of entries labeled sEssentialFileCacheList and sUnessentialFileCacheList, and they had links to fallout3 esm files. I copied and pasted with equivilent oblivion esm files:

sEssentialFileCacheList=Data\Oblivion.esm|Data2\Oblivion.esm, Data\Music\Special\tes4title.mp3, Data\Oblivion - Sounds.bsa|Oblivion - Sounds.bsa, Data\Oblivion - Voices1.bsa|Oblivion - Voices1.bsa, Data\Oblivion - Voices2.bsa|Oblivion - Voices2.bsa
sUnessentialFileCacheList=Data\Oblivion - Meshes.bsa|Data2\Oblivion - Meshes.bsa, Data\Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa|Data2\Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa, Data\Music\Dungeon\*.xma, Data\Music\Battle\*.mp3, Data\Music\Explore\*.mp3, Data\Music\Public\*.mp3, Data\Music\Special\*.mp3

There were also a few entries that were different that I changed and tested (not items that sounded like they differed for a reason, but something that may help loading although I can't recall which ones!) and also changed some graphics settings to make them better. Can't copy and paste everything because there are some things that need to be different concerning draw distance of trees, and fallout 3 has different load screen entries and also items relating to vats and the in-game computer consoles. But there were some commands that sounded like they were added to help loading assets and I placed them in the oblivion.ini file anyways even if the game engine can't support it, figured it wouldn't hurt.

I noticed only a teeny tiny bit of load stuttering now. Some of the graphical settings I copied over from fallout3 pertaining to character eyes seems to have caused lag in towns, so I recommend backing up the .ini if you want to mess around with it

It stutters when loading new stuff