Are there any mods or tweaks that make things easier on a low end system with regards lighting? My system runs oblivion well but ocassionally struggles when there are a lot of light sources around. I am using the wyre bash tweak to disable flickering lights and have no mods installed that change the lights at night or anything like that. I also have bloom and hdr turned off as i believe both are related to lighting.

Many light sources are a killer, especially torches everywhere. Do not use real Lights in this case, if you do. Posting your load order may help with making suggestions, or did you always have this problem even with only vanilla? Any specific location that you experience this?

I am not sure about HDR, but you can turn on bloom safely. Bloom is a post-process effect, taking into account only the image that is otherwise directly shown on your screen. It applies a filter to it, which will not get any faster/slower based on the amount of lights active.

Unfortunately I have no idea how to help you with your problem.

I don't think flickering lights have much of an impact on framerate, atleast compared to normal lights. What really causes a hit in your framerate is when lights mix together (that is, when more than one light source lights up a surface). Two lights doing this isn't much of a problem but three or more and it becomes an issue. For modding I've found that a single, large light source is much more efficient than two or more smaller light sources mixing together.

If you want to experiment with fixing this yourself, I would recommend loading up the CS and lowering the radius of lights that have a high user count. Some areas will appear darker but will run a lot smoother. If you want to go the extreme route you can start removing lights from areas and increasing the ambient light or add directional light to the cells.



I just want to add that this depends on your video card. Older cards will obviously want these settings turned off but newer cards don't show any decrease in performance with them turned on. Actually on my card it runs faster with HDR on than with bloom. This is just one of those settings you have to experiment with to see if it has any effect.

One thing that might help: Find this setting in your Oblivion.ini file (NOT the Oblivion Default INI file):
bEquippedTorchesCastShadows=1
Change it to 0. That will disable shadows cast by torches.