Here are my new specs:

i7 930 @ 4ghz
Radeon HD5970
6GB Dominator GT's
X-Fi Xtremegamer
WD Blue 500GB

Given the above specs, I play Oblivion pretty smoothly at max, with some AA forced through a RadeonPro profile. However I still experience FPS drops on certain areas (Weye, cities, waterfront, Imperial Capital, etc.) despite none of my resources being maxed out at all. None of my cores hit 50%, and my GPU cores never go above 30% in these areas. RAM usage is pretty low, and my HDD isn't thrashing either, so it's not that. My Oblivion.ini is still the same as from my previous build (Q6600, 6GB DDR2-800, same GPU). Removing my forced AA doesn't help either, other than reducing my GPU load while FPS stays the same.

So yeah, I notice none of my components being overly stressed, yet I get FPS drops. What could the problem be?

Try regenerating the .ini. You'll have to restore your video settings, but it's worth a shot.

Also, when you say your cores never go above 50%, you mean the individual cores themselves, correct? Oblivion is not very well multi-threaded (if at all) and will likely just max out one core at most. Those areas you mentioned are very CPU-intensive (tons of AI to process).


Also, are you using any mods?

Yes I mean none of the cores, whether Hyperthreading is on or off (4 or 8 cores). I realize the AI and everything is tough to process, and I'd be fine with the lack of optimization just fine. But I don't see it maxing any of my resources, which is why I'm wondering what's bottlenecking my setup. I'll try regenerating the INI though, but I'm not sure how that would help. Thanks though.

The game engine.

I second the query, re: mods. If you're using lots of graphics replacers/effects and/or lots of AI, it can murder *any* desktop out there. Yep, even watercooled Intel 6-core/12-thread monstrosities with the quadfire or quad-SLI setups from hell. Oh, and any amount of RAM. With RAID 0 SSDs.

The combination of extremely demanding configurations, and an extremely inefficient, flawed game engine in the first place... yeah, that's the way it will go. Slooooow.

Just as well I love the game as much as I do!

Unless you have 48 SSDs in a RAID, 12 gigs of RAM, dual Xeons, and Quad-SLI Watercooled and Overclocked GTX 480s on a fiber-optic motherboard from NASA, you're going to suffer from FPS drops in some particularly bad areas. This game is that poorly optimized.

not to isult anyones intelligence, have you checked out the old http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_9.html article? On that page it mentions if youve got a multicore cpu to change a few ini settings. And alot of ingame tweaks worth looking over.

Hardly. Well, not mine, anyway.



Poison, or so consensus has it. I wouldn't recommend it either. But hey, you could try. It won't kill your PC or whatever...

This. I tried it years ago when it was still relevant.

Thanks for the input though guys. I think I'm just going to start from a vanilla install again to avoid any issues.