that's great to know, have a nice life man. I'm still waiting for the day I'll have a rig capacle of running modblivion decently... although I'd probably go crazy looking for mods, so let's just hope TES5 comes out quickly and is a lot more optimized than oblivion and fallout3 are

Hah, I'm with you there.

This seems the right place to post this:

So, I'm in Chorrol. As soon as I leave a building, perfect FPS. 15 seconds later, 2fps. 5 after that, it's almost a standstill. This happens smoothly, and turning off scripts returns to normal FPS.
So, my question: Is there are a script benchmarker that can tell me what, precisely, is causing this horrendous slowdown?

So the tweak guide's cache recommendation is not very good?

I would LOVE a tool like that!

Anyone?

The ".ini Settings and Tweaks to Consider" in the first post is a better guide.

Don't touch the ugrid or cell buffers unless you want performance issues. Other than that the Oblivion Tweakguide is right on most of the settings, just avoid their entire Memory section.

Lets take that one step further - don't mess with the ini at all. The default one generated after patch 1.2.0406 is actually fairly good and only needs a couple of very minor changes, like the shadowmapresolution setting being something larger than 256. The Tweakguides page is badly out of date and does more harm than good for stability.

Late reply, but here it is: http://tinyurl.com/kmgaxd

if anyone is having jerky frames check this out.

"write combing" right click on the desktop > properties > settings tab > click advanced at the bottom > troubleshoot tab > uncheck "Enable writing combing".


with newer built systems I've read it's useless and can cause jerky frames along with errors/crashes. I've been playing with it unchecked so far and it's been good.

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/546019.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write-combining

Hello!!! It's been a while...

AT LEAST! Oblivion is working like I allways dreamed, with 300 mods and almost no stuttering (big thanks Oblivion Stutter Remover and TOPP here).

But use to had some CTD and some critic stuttering too.

So, I found one of the big stuttering culprits, LARGE TEXTURES!

Installing mod is great, but some of them lack of optimization.

One texture for gauntles or boots of 2048x2048!!! 10 mb for a set of boots. The same for rings or helmets!


So, my TIP is:

With Photoshop, give a look to the textures installed by mods. And reduce (optimize) if necessary.

Keep all textures less than 2Mb.

For Ex.: Ring, amulets good are 256x256 resolution.

Gauntlets, boots, gloves, pauldrons, shoes 512x512.

The same for other textures like landscapes 1024x1024, leafs, etc.

And save the DDS with compression DX5. Belive me, you will no have NO reduction of image quality. Leave QTP3 alone.


After optimization of a great number of textures, the stuttering reduce a lot, and also have a FPS boost.

Hope this helps!

Skeleton


Edit: @Elicaris thanks for the "write combing" tip.

How long did it take for you to trace all culprits? I have thousands of textures!

It's easy, use the Windows search, then arrange by file size, and you'll find the more heavy (un-optimized) textures.

Based on their names and folder you can "see" if the size is ok.

For example, in the folder clothes search for the word "ring", if you see a ring texture with more than 1Mb, something is wrong. The best for ring is a max. of 600kb.

Another example, faces of 2048x2048 (5mb) are too big, and varius mods have this problem.

The same thing applies to normal maps, _n files.

Hope this helps.

This seemed a likely place to post this question, as a number of folks who read this thread pack many resource files into custom .bsa's.

If a mesh/texture is in a .bsa and then one later installs a mod that contains a different mesh/texture associated with the object, the loose files will show up in-game. There are situations where I would not want for this to happen; instead I would prefer that either A) the resources contained in the .bsa take priority Or B) that the resources in the .bsa take priority for some files but not others.

Now I could potentially remove the conflicting loose files associated with the newly installed mod that I didn't want to override the .bsa, but since there would be no overwrite/override warnings upon install, checking for such situations would be so labor intensive as to be impractical (to my understanding the only way to accomplish this would be to have directory output .txt files of all resources installed in .bsa's and then manually check each and every resource file of each mod I later install against this list?).

Great candidates for .bsa resource packing include large texture packs with eleventy bajillion files, which means the chance of these situations is not inconsequential. Additionally, I have found that it is not as uncommon as I would have thought for mods to include resources one would not necessarily expect, e.g. house mods adding furniture/architecture meshes/textures, quest mods changing creature skins or flora textures, etc., so it is not really practical to just use common sense to know what to check for in infrequent circumstances.

So, while I find the idea of packing a goodly portion of my replacers into .bsa's for the organizational and potential performance benefits to be attractive, I do not know how I would work around this issue.

How do you folks who do a lot of .bsa construction deal with this? Is there a simple solution that I am overlooking?

In Oblivion the newer file takes precedence, so if you have the same file or same name file in two BSA's, the newer is what will be loaded. (Criation data) You can use some program life FileDate to change the time stamps.

For me, the best to avoid a lot of duplicate files was to organize the BSA's into sections, as clutters, armors, architeture, clothes, races, etc, this for textures. For meshes I create the BSA's based in alphabetical order.

Currently for textures I have 19 BSA's. From A.bsa to N.bsa. A= Armors, B=Clothes, C=Weapons, etc

For Meshes 6 files U to Z.bsa. S.bsa for sounds. 1.bsa to 5.bsa for voices (Diverses Voises mod added).

I splitted them in 3 HD's, and almost none stuttering 1600x1200 all max, plus 300+ mods.

Hope this helps! Regards!

Hi Skeleton

Thanks for the reply. The real problem as is not what to do with the files once I know there will be a conflict but rather how to know if there will be a conflict in the first place, since when I install a new mod I will receive no automatic warning that a resource file in the new mod duplicates a resource file I currently have installed in a bsa.

Two examples: 1. Say I have Elegant Vests installed and I really like what it does to ... vests. I then want to install a CNRP. What I would want is for Elegant Vests to remain in force for its resources but for CNRP to win everything else. Once I know that they have dup files I could solve the prob by editing CNRP or otherwise designating most but not all files in CNRP to override upon install etc., but the trick is that if Elegant Vests is in a bsa then I couldn't know without manually checking each file in CNRP against all my resources. With as many replacers as I have there is a LOT to check, and not all are apparent. 2. Say I have two mods. Both edit soulgems, armor, and creature skins, among Many other things. I would prefer one of the mods to handle wilderness creatures, the other to do mystical creatures, one to do armor, one to do soulgems, etc. Again I can fix it if I know about it, but the only way I do know about it is installing both mods as loose files vs bsa's because then I am alerted upon install. These two examples are somewhat simplistic and just for illustrative purposes.

I realize there may not be an easy/convenient way to do this X vs. .bsa file checking, I just thought I would inquire to see if there is a nifty jedi technique or utility of which I am unaware that folks use to get around the issue.

Thanks again.

That's complicate... there is no automatic process, you'll have to ckeck by yourself.

Sometimes I use xcopy.com, from a CMD window, to copy all the files from mod1 to mod2 without overwriting the mod2 ones.

So I unpack all the mods BSA and unite them into one BSA's or varius splitted by category.

Always keeping all mods backup, so if something goes wrong can undo the changes.

And testing the mod ingame to see if it is working ok.

Regards

I'm running FCOM+180esps or so, and my game is extremely smooth except from some CTDs that always occour while running in the worldspace: basically i stutter for like a sec, music stops, then game tries to keep going but it fails. This was getting on my nerve because i've a pretty decent system (64bit OS, GTX285, 4gb RAM and a x3 processor), so what i did was looking at this guide and i changed my iPreloadSizeLimit to a much higher value. Is this related somehow/could help with my problem? I tried to run from cheydinhal to IC and i got there crashfree: still got a lot of microstutters (even if my fps were very high all the time, and i'm using OSR+Streamline streamsight) but that's probably related also to my high walking speed. Still i don't know if it was just a coincidence or not. x.x

Help...the INI tweaks. I have absolutely no idea...I mean...geh. What should I do? I have Vista. I have to run Oblivion on the lowest quality...so yeah, it kinda svcks. Help? What INI tweaks would I absolutely need to at least get Oblivion to run on 'low' quality with little to no lag?

In order to help you we need a little more information.
What values are you using in streamline (sl.ini)? SLv.MinDistanceFog , Slv.MaxDistanceFog
What values are you using in oblivion.ini? UgridDistantTreeRange , uGridDistantCount
What values are you using in OSR? MinimumFPS , MaximumFPS , iHeapMode
And what is your vertical refresh rate & do you have vsync on?
What fps numbers were you getting in game?
How high is your walking speed?

Ok. these are some of my settings.

Sl.ini: set SLv.MinDistanceFog to 30000, set SLv.MaxDistanceFog to 136000.
uGridDistantTreeRange=15, uGridDistantCount=25.
iPreloadSizeLimit=26214400 (since i run FCOM+tons of mods, do i need to increase this value as the guide says? could this be related to the random CTDs in the open world?).
OSR settings: MinimumFPS=10, MaximumFPS=30, iHeapMode to 0 (i tried HeapMode 1 but i couldn't even get to the title screen).
Yes i've vsync on.
Indoor (cave, ruins ecc) i'm having a stable 30fps (withou OSR cap, i'm around 45-50fps), outside around 20-30, with drops and struttering only during loading times.

Recently i removed my distantLod folder and i gained a bit in smoothness and stability, since i've yet to crash in the wild since i did that (is it a coincidence? i don't know, i tried to provoke a crash running around for 30mins with my 106 waking speed but i didn't crash, even in heavily modded zone like chorrol hinterland, dark forest or rolling hills). Even more, yesterday i tried for the first time to clean my pluings following the guide on the wiki: i cleaned 68 esps and the gain in performance was huge. No more random CTDs on startup, faster loading times, rocksolid fps in the worldspace (ok i was still without any generated lod, but i had 30fps even in the darkforest with my high running speed, and the microstruttering during cell loading were greatly reduced). Too bad that i soon discovered that i was crashing every ********** time i was trying to save or streamsave, so i had soon revert to my original and dirty esps. I'll probably post about this in another topic since i'de really like to get the cleaning right.

I want to add that, after further testing, i'm pretty confident that my CTDs in the wild have nothing to do with strutter problem. I played now twice, going around only in the open world and during both testing i crashed after 20mins or so of playing while i was having no fps problem at all: the game just shutted down by itself in a matter of seconds, without freezing or anything like that. I understand close to nothing about hardware, but could this be a memory problem (even with 4gb RAM 1gb VRAM..) or is more likely a mods/ini problem?

For your values of SLv.MinDistanceFog 30k, Slv.MaxDistanceFog 136k you should have: UgridDistantTreeRange = uGridDistantCount = 25. But since this is the vanilla oblivion fog distances you should turn streamsight off since its not really doing anything for you.
In the streamline folders you should find a 'Streamsight Fog Ranges.mht' that shows what values of UgridDistantTreeRange & uGridDistantCount that are equal and correspond/match to the appropriate values of MinDistanceFog & MaxDistanceFog. Streamsight will have calculation issues if these values are not in sync.
You can increase iPreloadSizeLimit=78643200 to handle your combination of mods in use.

I use streamsave in auto (timer) and manual, remapped the key to F5 as per the readme. Do not use the vanilla auto/quick save.
To reduce save/cpu competition does your Oblivion.ini settings look like this?
bSaveOnTravel=0
bSaveOnWait=0
bSaveOnRest=0
bAllowScriptedAutosave=0
bSaveOnInteriorExteriorSwitch=0

In the sl.ini streamsave configuration area I have all 0's except for:
set SLv.SaveTimer to 4
set SLv.NumSaveSlots to 40
set SLv.GagAutoSaves to 1
set SLv.LowHealthThreshold to 0.2

But its whatever works for you.

Your walking speed of 106 is that the fMoveCharWalkMin value?
Do you have Slv.FPSsmoothing turned on?

If you have cleaned the mods correctly/or not there is no need to go back to the base mods. Just start with the vanilla and start adding mods in small groups and test. Remember to rebuild the bash patch for each new load group.

Do you run any other games that put as much load cpu & gpu as oblivion? If you don't have problems with other games its probably not hardware.

I just discovered a program called http://www.iobit.com/gamebooster.html. It has proven to be the single most effective tool in improving my game speed and cleaning my fragmented data files. It makes it a snap to turn off all unwanted background processes when playing games.

I was even able to increase my game's resolution, the difference was so much. However, I haven't done any actual framerate tests. I encourage you to try it for yourself.

With all the talk of working load orders and such - I thought this deserved a bump.

Something I read a lot when starting out.

And to add to it ... http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=1071593 has really contributed to performance in my game. Used in combination with OSR on my Vista 64 rig is working great.

Previously I'd used the 3gb enabler without OSR (didn't exist then) and saw no improvement.

Also gotta give a shout out to http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=1053086. Specifically
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=22136 - a great alternative to Streamline.
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=29127 - a great debugging esp that allows you to get what mods are effecting what actors while in game.