I seem to recall there being a max size the Oblivion engine could read, but don't remember the number. Trying to Google it all the threads in this board have been purged...
I thought it was 1 GB, but seeing Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa at 1.2 GB I'm not so sure anymore...

I believe it's around 2GB.

Yeah the discussion was about BSA splitting and something called ORB.

My saved thread on that is long expired there is reference here (which deserves more bumps than my measly thread) at the http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=881204&st=0.

I thought it was around 1 gig too and that the point of the practice was to decompress the BSA files for faster searching of them (which then causes the textures BSA to be more than 1 gig) so then it needs to be split.

Or it was that splitting the BSA files across two drives increased performance because 'the needle' of the second drive would be then completely dedicated to that task. Never heard rave reviews about it and so never did it.

I've never even uncompressed my BSAs either.

The limit is exactly 2GB (real GB, not hd GB) because it is a limit based on address space.

ORB had a lot of potential, but like most things Oblivion based the results varied heavily depending on your hardware setup.

That said, uncompressed BSAs do increase performance for some people (depending on hardware, of course) and uncompressing the vanilla BSAs still keeps them below the 2GB limit.

Also, placing some of your BSAs on a different physical drive can decrease load stuttering since the computer is capable of loading from both drives faster than from a single drive. It's not perfect because you can't really balance the resources properly the way Oblivion uses them...this is what ORB was meant to fix.

Of course, these days there are even better ways of reducing stutter.

I had read 2gb from most recent posts. But about two years ago I was reading 1.5gb was the limit. I have a few BSA's above 1.5gb that seem to be fine. I would lean towards the 2gb limit that Showler mentioned. And as he said, hardware plays a part in how data is handled with Oblivion. All of the threads that talk about harddrive needles and such no longer apply to me. Using an SSD drive now, so I have to re-think how all of my files will be read by the game.
So far, uncompressed BSA's seem to be the best approach still, but splitting BSA archives across my SSD and HDD seemed to cause more stutter. My guess is the HDD just can't keep up with the SDD and the game enters a point where it is waiting on data to finish up loading a cell etc...

Interestingly enough though, I've noticed about the same performance just leaving my files in loose directories when using the SSD.

SSD's have no moving parts hence seek time delay has no part there so you can have loose files, where as a conventional electro-mechanical disk does have a seek time, so packing loose files into bsa's helps there.

I have installed oblivion on a SSD (Intel X25-M "Postville" 160 GB), for many mods I use uncompressed BSA- files, optimized meshes (PYFFI), OSR 4.1.3

and

the game stutters


The biggest BSA- file is a texture BSA from Apachii Goddess Store with a file size of 1.817.128 KB (windows explorer detail list)

I think the problem is something between cpu, nb, sb and the absolutely perfect oblivion engine ... and to many big mods.

It's not 2 GB. It's more than that. I uncompressed my vanilla textures and it's sitting at 2.02 GB and I haven't had any troubles.

Showler's Quote -

I think that is what Showler was trying to specify. (2048mb if I'm not mistaken?)

@Baphometal - Yeah, I still stutter as well. Nothing has helped more than OSR. Just was wanting to point out that on a SSD, loose game files perform better than on an HDD. Don't want the old HDD tips to filter over to SSD users. The need to pack loose files into uncompressed BSA archives is less. However, I still will do it in the end only because there is still some benefit. I didn't know Apache Goddess store was that HUGE! Do you notice the stutter outside of the store, or just when entering the store/

EDIT - @Malonn - What is the total MB readout of your 2.02gb file? I suppose I could google convert it... but ya know...

Oh.