Ok, that demonstrates you can load the videocard fully if you try hard enough. You did not yet mention your monitor resultion though. And how much RAM has your videocard?

About HDR: You can tweak the HDR settings in the oblivion.ini. I agree default HDR is too "flashy". I can look up my last modified HDR settings, if you like. If you are willing to experiment (very time consuming) you can tweak HDR a lot in the .ini

I am just using Bloom these days as I like a little bit of AA (2x or 4x) in my game. Forcing it via Nvidia not always works, so I just settled for Bloom. But to be honest, after getting used to Bloom I nowadays really like it. I find it more "natural" than HDR, even when you reduce the HDR effect. Most of the times HDR is (for me) too "spectacular" and "dramatic". But of course this is just my preference.

It could also be a simple question of the picture quality of each individual monitor. Some LCD's produce really dull colors, so HDR-pimping is very well "needed" for those.

I installed Oblivion in several different rigs and I found that powerful rig would actually benefit FPS for Oblivion, but the benefit is inefficient due to the crappy engine.

My videocard ram is 1.5GB.
I would be glad to see the HDR settings.
Though I prefer HDR, I like Bloom as well.
In my opinion, Bloom looks less contrastive but more aesthetic.

I would like to see these also, anything would be better than default I would think.

Try these ...


[BlurShaderHDRInterior]
fBrightScale=2.2500 ; Try 0.7500
fBlurRadius=7.0000 ; Try 3.5000

[BlurShaderHDR]
fBrightScale=1.5000 ; Try 0.5000
fBlurRadius=4.0000 ; Try 3.0000

What kind of monitor do you have by the way? I have used 3 separate ones and they all looked different. However, I assume these setting on any monitor are ones to manipulate HDR?

Peter, i think you just have to experiment for yourself. I for example used:

[BlurShaderHDRInterior]
fBrightScale=1.7500
fBlurRadius=6.0000

So mine were less drastic than alt3nity's. For exteriors I left them at default, but probably because I am lazy. However it seems "Radius" and "Scale" are definitely the settings you need to play with. I have never seen any changes to any of the other settings in the HDR section of the .ini

Thanks Tommy, I will see if I can find a good fit for my monitor.

Yep experimentation is the key with these, and dependant on your own perception / monitor, I have different settings for myself on the laptop compaired with the settings on the desktop which allow more HDR brightness as a happy medium for all users in the family on that machine. YMMV

Tip

Theres also a bad by-product of not having HDR on IMHO, as much as I dont like HDR generally, I do like having grass fade out nicely at its maximum instead of popping in/out which happens if you have HDR off .. The following setting with HDR off no longer applies in game ..

[BlurShaderHDR]
fGrassDimmer=1.3000

So I needed HDR on to keep that effect, and found the previously mentioned HDR brightness taming tweaks were ideal with a bit of messing

Did a test by turning off internal and external shadows in my indoor fight. Negligible difference. Then I found something interesting, at least to me:

I began to disable the two flame sources in the room. Surprisingly, the number of lights stayed the same and the lighting was there, even though the flames were not. I used SDT 13 that shows number of lights, and number of active lights.

So the flames you see are not the lights. The light effect is. I do not know where to click to disable it.

I killed the 12 enemies and my FPS went to between 12-30, depending where I looked. I would look at a wall in the room and I stilled showed a total of 13 lights even though they were not in that room. My FPS would still dip down to 8 or so even when all the enemies were dead, making me think that the NPCs do not have significant impact on the FPS in my case. I exit the room through a load door and the light count remained at 14 even though the active lights would vary depending where I looked. I disabled 2 more flames but the place remained lit and the total light count stayed the same and the place was still lit.

I was then surprised by a Ravager Fury who cast a fireball. When he did, the light count went up by 1 and then down by one when the spell expired in a couple seconds.

What I can conclude from this (which modders probably already know and are letting me ramble) is there are multiple types of lights:
Torches which cast light that is extinguished when the torch goes out, have a measurable impact on FPS.
Flames in a room seem to be fake light sources with little impact.
Lighting areas in a room have a measurable impact on FPS (I do not know how they are placed).

As was mentioned earlier in this thread by Nephenee13 that there was a FPS problem with one NPC in the room makes me think the room had a bunch of light areas possibly.

I wonder if Cava Obscura would make a difference in the room as it darkens interiors? I will try this next.

EDIT: Cava Obscure seemed to give me a couple FPS on average, so there was benefit from it. However, in a room of dead npc's and an area showing 13 lights, I should not have 8-11 FPS when facing in certain directions. The number of active lights out of total lights do not seem to relate to the FPS on a consistent basis. I could be showing 9/13 lights with 25 FPS and 7/13 lights with 11 FPS.

So other than opening the CS and changing the lighting in Fort Homestead to see how the lighting effect plays on FPS, I do not know where else can go with this, other than to Skyrim

I wonder if out the multitude of ini settings there is one that affects this.

Has anyone thought about making a mod that deactivates the unnecessary flashes of light when casting spells (for the player character, but the NPCs too)? This could help especially when encountering a lot of casters. When I cast buffs my FPS break in too.

Wow, what a difference. Thanks for those.



Yeah, that would be something. I wonder if anyone will be making anything new now that Skyrim is here.

You've just discovered the wonder of fake light sourcing. This game is filled with instances of that. In the vanilla game, nearly all visible sources for light aren't actually what's providing the light. There are invisible "bulb" objects placed in the CS that actually give off the light.

This sort of thing is precisely what gave rise to the Real Lights project because there are instances where it's drop dead obvious that the light is not coming from the fire or whatever.

Joy! Is there something special about those lights that can cause a performance hit? Anyway to disable in game?

Supreme Magicka has an optional esp that does just that.

Edit: Just found http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=6947

Downloading now, thanks for that Here you go :icecream:

I dont think theres anything special about them, its just a case of the more there are in an area the closer you get to a slideshow. Mods adding an abundance of light sources can be a problem, they might work fine on the creators uber rig but anything less will have trouble.

Tonas Mod Store is an example of this, as soon as you set foot in there, immediately to your left is a statue. I think he used the same base building as the Oak and Crosier, but the statue was added with a few flowers and stuff, and light sources around the edge and back of the statue to enhance the scene (like a cathedral at night). On my old laptop (which just had an athlon 3500 single core, and nvidia 5 series mobile graphics) as soon as I looked at the statue it was slideshow city, look away and nearly normal frame rates came back.

Removing them you would have to use the Construction set on the mod, or create a mod for a particular area to remove vanilla light sources.

I dont know exactly how the game uses light sources, but I think they are CPU power dependant, https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics) (though probably more efficient than that old method)

On my new laptop core 2 duo, the last time I had Tonas mod store installed performance in the same location was a lot better, but still noticeable. Another example would be Khettiennas http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=22135, when you walk down to Vicente Valtieri's room, instead of turning left theres an extended corridor which is lined with candles among skulls .. Khettienna has been very considerate of this problem and provided two light switches there to dim and reduce the amount of light sources.

Edit: Settings you can play about with to help the situation ...

fLightLOD1
fLightLOD2

They change the distance when dynamic light (candles, fireballs, torches, etc) are applied to objects. By setting them to large negative values you can disable lighting all together. Can be a help with graphics cards (like GeForce FX's) which have slow shaders. Fighting in exterior areas all lighting effects from fireballs etc are completely removed which will result in large speed ups.

When using the above also make sure you have bDoAmbientPass on, otherwise the world can be too dark to play.

Some would recommend turning off bDoSpecularPass also, but there are game crashing problems associated with doing that, best to just reduce specular lighting in the in-game settings to a lower count. Crashing with this turned off has something to do with secret passages IIRC, sounds bizarre but apparently true.

Since someone mentioned that Oblivion's engine is bad, I was wondering if Skyrim's is better? I was under the impression that it is basically Oblivions, but it would be a nice surprise to hear it is much better optimized
..

Skyrim's engine is Creation engine, which is upgraded from Oblivion's. Creation engine is much more efficient and stable, but it can't catch up with the latest engine such as cryengine 3.

Another one I should have remembered :facepalm:

Bashed Patch No Light Flicker tweak - http://www.bild.me/bild.php?file=7008849Untitled.jpg

Can also help with performance if you dont mind the loss of flickering.

It's far more robust because Skyrim is optimized better on multi-core systems and with the updated video drivers the SLI/Crossfire profiling works too.

It's still Gamebryo under the hood - don't fall for marketing hype. There's nothing new about the engine. It's just more optimized and more mature than it was even for F:NV.

For those FLightLOD settings mentioned above, heres my settings currently

fLightLOD2=500.0000
fLightLOD1=250.0000

And to give you a visual idea of ranges, here's Armand Christophe walking towards with a torch (right click and open each in a new tab so you can flick between tabs to compare) ..

http://www.bild.me/bild.php?file=3221992ScreenShot202.jpg

http://www.bild.me/bild.php?file=5345809ScreenShot203.jpg

http://www.bild.me/bild.php?file=4930175ScreenShot204.jpg

Defaults on my system were ..
fLightLOD2=1500.0000
fLightLOD1=1000.0000
I remember one of David Brashers mods had a tip from GrandDukeAdense to increase these to something like 10000 and 8000 respectively, which made one of the dungeons open spaces in particular look really stunning, lots of far distance lighting effects which only came into play all at once if you increased the settings .. For my machine it was a slideshow, beautiful scene when stood still but not very practical.

LOD2 is the max distance when lighting effects on surroundings comes into play, LOD1 is the distance when they are fully faded in. So lessening these settings brings down the amount of light sources calculated for its effects.

Nice tips. I will try these. My current settings are:
fLightLOD2=4500
fLightLOD1=4000

This gives me nice lighting in IC with 80% darker nights. I will see how yours work.

Others answered it better before I suppose, but figured I'd chime in and say that my modded Skyrim on Ultra runs much much smoother than my modded Oblivion on High. Ofcourse I have many more mods for Oblivion, but still the difference is quite huge.

The engine isn`t bad, it just isn`t meant to show more than one character onscreen. :wink_smile: