So I just got a new PC a little over a month ago and decided that I wanted to play Oblivion again before I got into Skyrim... the game was running at 60fps with no drop at all anywhere, the whole time. Then I had an issue with the HDD I had and replaced it with an SSD and also got a second vid card to do crossfire. I reformatted the PC and everything was good. Skyrim runs at 60fps pretty much 90% of the time and I don't really have any issues with any other games.

One last week I decided to install Oblivion. Before I installed any mods, I went into the game with my saved character and noticed stuttering... so I thought maybe some setting wasn't working or something wasn't on/off. Checked everything and it was all good. I checked the frame rate and that was the issue... I was getting dips into the 30s in some places. I can't believe it! I was getting perfect performance before and now with an SSD and CF, I should be getting even more performance out of a 5+ year old game. Anyone know what might be wrong? What are somethings I should look into?

I tried going back to the drivers I was using before Skyrim and nothing. Still the same performance. Some places give me 60fps with CF disabled and then with it enabled I lose 10-15fps. BUT in some areas turning CF off I also lose around 20fps. I really would like to finish the MQ for Oblivion, but hate the micro stuttering I get cause the game is running under 60fps.

My specs:
i7 2600k @ 4.6Ghz
8gb G. Skill Ripjaws X DDR3 1600Mhz
OCZ Vertex 3 SSD
2x HD6870s 1gb
Corsair TX V2 850W PSU
Win7 Ultimate

It can't be a driver or hardware issue. It's gotta be something I didn't think about in regards to the game when installing it. Some setting that I changed or didn't change... ? I don't think I have the best system in the world, but it should be able to more than handle Oblivion I think. Also, I tried making a new character, thinking my old save might be the issue, but I still have the same problem.

It's Oblivion. Oblivion is horribly optimized. Your best bet is to play without CF if that fixes things.

I would not mind if this was the case.... but it runs worse in certain areas and better in others. The whole thing too... is that it was running fine. Heck, I had a 9800XT with a AMD 1800+XP back in the day that could max it out with the same frame rate I am getting now.

Again, it's Oblivion. Mods will help some, but it's how the game is made.

Another thing you can do is optimize the meshes with NifOpt or PyFFI. Will take a long time, but it's worth it.

Well I guess this svcks... I guess I'll try again some day when I reformat.

I don't think the issue I am having is to do with optimizing anything to make it run better... since I am getting 200+fps in some areas... but it's just Oblivion showing it's bad coding in the areas I have issues in. Which is easily 50% of the game.


Is there anything like skyboost for Oblivion?

You misunderstand. The meshes in Oblivion are not optimized by default. Optimizing the meshes has shown to be the biggest boost to FPS. Other than that, Oblivion is an unoptimized mess. >_>

Oblivion only uses one core (and a bit of the second) and doesn't benefit from crossfire at all. I would actually suggest disabling crossfire unless you are playing recent games as it will only cause problems with anything that hasn't been optimized for it.

Search on TesNexus for OSR (Oblivion Stutter Remover). It optimizes some of the code and how the game loads data. It is basically Oblivion's version of Skyboost, although it doesn't change as much. You have to read the readme and configure OSR's .ini to get it to work.

Just to add to your post, OSR is mainly a heap replacer. Just thought I'd mention it so that confusion will be lessened down the line.

Haha yeah I just opted for generalizations. I don't actually know a "heap" is, or how it works, and I try not to to throw around words that I don't know the meaning of

A heap is a lump of memory that can be allocated with the associated functions. Oblivion's default heap did not allocate memory efficiently and OSR fixes that by replacing the heap to a more efficient one.

Now you can throw it around.

I tried OSR and it didn't fix the low frame rate issue. I am stuttering because of the low frame rate also... I read somewhere else that someone said their sound drivers were giving them issues, so I am going to uninstall and reinstall and see if that does anything. I'll be back to post results!

The best results are gained by using a combination of various things. There isn't a "fix" by anyone thing for Oblivion. There are many things you must do to make Oblivion run better and they don't fix the issue, just make it more manageable. Oblivion is and was an unoptimized mess. Optimize your meshes, apply the 4 GB patch, run OSR, and so forth. That will give you better results. Optimizing the meshes has shown to give some of the best results, however.

Ok. I will try as much as I can today to get it running better...

One very interesting thing that's happeneing... my GPUs are not being used anymore than 3% each and when I disable crossfire, the single card only peaks 5%. I played for 20 min and there was times when for longer than 3min at a time it wouldn't peak above 1%...

Vanilla Oblivion is not very graphically intensive. However, it is very CPU intensive. Texture packs will increase the load on the GPU if you really want to use more of it. Though, that's a level up and a click in the mod section.

I gave up. There's a section outside of Anvil... where I dip down into the high teens and low 20s... it's just unacceptable. Several other areas like that, in Skingrad by the chapel, Bruma in the city center... Did the mesh optimization, used OSR and played with the ini using all types of different settings (it at least ran smooth while the frame rate stayed up), used the 4gb fix, and tried a mix of a few different optimizers.

Maybe I'll try to go through the frustration of getting it working some day in the future.

Thanks for the help guys!