Hi

Okay, so I've been playing Oblivion for something over a hundred hours now, everything has been running just fine, perfectly even, no performance issues at all. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. Usually a few seconds after loading, performance drops through the floor to something stutterinng and sticky as if the games being run on a sub standard gfx card all of a sudden, its also responding slower to key commands too, as if it stops processing for a while to have a think. Anyway, I've tried the basic reboots & reloads with no joy. Furthermore I remember having similar problems with Fallout 3 and Vegas (using fresh, not overwriutten saves hasn't worked) and I wouldn't be surprised if this might be fixable through some proper tweaking, it certainly made a difference for those Bethesda games. I'm running on windows 7 with a quadcore and a gfx card Oblivion won't recognise as it didn't exist back then, so its likely some tweaking would help regardless. Then again, if its not flint knapping, computers become a bit of a mystery to me past a certain point, so it could be anything.

So, anyone got any idea what I can to to get back to my hack & slash exploring fix? For the record, it's a Steam install of Oblivion that came with all the DLCs and a raw install, no mods. I've just downloaded the unoffocial patch but its unhelpful (read non existand) install directions have left to me cold and hoping you folks might turn out to be more helpull.

Anyway, help, please...