Just checked out Better Cities and it drops my fps by quite a bit. Just wondering if Unique Landscapes affects your fps better or worse than Better Cities. I'll probably be disabling better cities and was curious if I should bother downloading Unique Landscapes. It looks very impressive but I'm just curious about the fps hit.

Thanks

Have you used the FPS patches for Better Cities? If not, use them.
Are you using VWD options (visible when distant) for Imperial City? If so, drop them.

What are your PC specs?

ULs will be more intensive than vanilla Oblivion, but should be less intensive than BCs as usually the biggest FPS drop is due to addition of NPCs, more than that duue to additional meshes+textures. UL mods usually don't add a lot of NPCs.

UL doesn't hit my framerate particularly badly, BC however does, even with the FPS patches.

Thanks for the quick response.

I tried the fps patches last night and they do drop the fps to the point where it's playable so I may keep in installed. The biggest problem I have is my computer. I'm using a laptop. 2.13Ghz i3, 8gb memory, with a Geforce 310M video. It does have dedicated video memory which is unusual for a laptop. I can play oblivion on high graphics settings with HDR lighting but using the full Better cities was a little too much. I don't have the VWD setup and the fps patches helped to the point where I may keep it. I'll probably give the Unique Landscapes a shot anyway. They look impressive. Thanks

Perhaps you already have, but if not, I recommend stripping Oblivion back to "pure vanilla" some time (or having a vanilla install, side by side), and keeping an eye on frames per second in different areas, as well as with different numbers and kinds of NPCs, animals, etc. Personally, I found this very informative. For example, some people have mistakenly blamed Better Cities for a dramatic drop in FPS in the Waterfront area of the Imperial City. See what that area does in vanilla, and you will see what I am getting at.

That said, Better Cities is known to have a more significant impact on FPS, generally speaking, than Unique Landscapes. Open Cities Classic does not impact FPS noticeably. Open Cities Reborn might, somewhat, but I am fairly sure that the impact is relatively minor. And not only does that mod provide, well, open cities (a very good thing in itself), but also an interpretation of the original Bethesda concept art for the cities, resulting in the cities being "as they should have been", one might say.

In addition to what arafel said, there is a Better Cities compatibility patch for Open Cities Reborn, adding the BC buildings to the OCR cities, but not adding the street clutter and extra plants from BC, so you can get the best of both worlds at a reduced hit to FPS.

Also just to add my 2 septims in, if you have any mods that add extra NPCs, such as Crowded Cities, that will really impact your FPS.

The point of all the above is that UL is going to add a bit of load to your GPU being mainly a graphical enhancement, but BC (and any mod adding NPC's) adds load to the CPU with all the extra animation. Since Oblivion doesn't make use of extra cores, CPU is most often the limiting factor for FPS these days, although it was the video card that set the limits when it was released.

Modern GPU's are pretty well exploited by the game (except for some of the latest tesselation and similar tricks) but a multi-core modern CPU doesn't help, and if the clock speed is low, as in many laptops that are trying to reduce heat, then an overall "faster" machine may be slower for Oblivion.