Just a quick question about Operation Optimization, does it conflict with texture replacers (Q3 Redimized, Bomret's SI Textures)? Similarly, does Optimised Distant Land MAX conflict with LOD generators/texture replacers?

Yes, but ince OO optimizes vanilla textures you should let QTR and Bomret overwrite them.

Thanks!

I am trying to get the most performance out of my system so I am going to be using BSA commander and ORB directory splitter to decompress and split my directories onto two different drives, my primary drive C: and my second drive. However, I have partitioned the second drive.

I used Partition Magic to create two partitions on my second drive, a 74 gigabyte 10,000 RPM hard drive. The first partition (F:) is approximately 32 GB and the second partition (G:) is approximately 35 GB. I want to make sure I put the decompressed-split directory on the area of my hard drive that gives me the highest performance. This accelerated performance area of the hard drive is closest to the outer edge of the hard drive. How would I know that the F: partition is the partition closest to the high performance outer edge? Is it just because F comes before G? OR could there be a possibility that the G: partition is the one including the fastest area of the hard drive?

Ive installed the latest version of operation optimization and i do not notice any fps adjustments, im still getting jutters here and their when i am exploring when i was having a battle in a cave at the start fps were dropping bad.

My system should be more than capable of running this.

My processor is pentium dual core running at 3 gig

4 gig of ram

geforce 8800GT 512 OC

Hey guys ...

i tried to optimize my new install by adding my replacers (UOP first, then QTP) into my original BSAs and i resolved my problem of my game not starting ( i had not updated the Files flags Hex in BSA com.) Now the game starts , but the loading screens are white, the menu logo is white , the moving icons are white, and the game starts but everything is purple and pink ! Bodies are missing , and i see pretty much nothing , but meshes all seems to be there . I was thinking that the game did invalidate my BSAs but i'm not sure ?

PIC : [img]http://s532.photobucket.com/albums/ee325/Conker343qc/OB%20install%20problems/?action=view¤t=Oblivion2008-12-0611-25-27-48.jpg[/img]

So ... Maybe an invalidation problem ?? seems like it to me...

EDIT : Maybe my textures paths were wrong ... but i just don't know how to fix that . Should i plant my textures in the data folder (like if i don't put them in BSAs) and pack them from there ?

I just found something about my problem ! When i browse my textures BSAs in OBMM , the path starts with the folder inside the texture folder (ex: weapons/silverlongsword.dds) . Is this kind of path complete or i'm missing .../textures ???

BSA's take the place of the "data" folder. So your paths are correct - textures\weapons\xxx.dds or meshes\weapons\xxx.nif.

Also there is a known problem with .nif files when unpacking and re-packinig bsa's.
Sometimes (I don't know why) the path within the meshes (.nif) has "/" instead of "\" (or vise versa I can never remember exactly).
Search for BSA in the forum topic title to read more.

I'm do not know which bsa tool you used, but personnally, I have not had problems with bsa's unpacked and re-packed using OBMM.
And I think BSA commander or TESGecko has a function to verify and change if necessary the path.

The directory splitter was made to split resources between two physical drives. Splitting between two partitions on the same drive isn't going to improve performance, but putting the files on the edge of the drive might. The fancier defragmenters (I don't know about Partition Magic) have options to do this for certain files as you defragment the drive. Making a separate partition is not necessary.



Stutter has more to do with your hard drives than anything else. There is no feasible consumer hardware setup that will completely eliminate stutter, end of story. Sorry.



I had the texture problem after splitting mine, and it turned out that I just didn't have the new BSAs properly registered. This is my working [Archive] section:

Archive]SMasterMiscArchiveFileName=Oblivion - Misc.bsaSMasterVoicesArchiveFileName2=Oblivion - Voices2.bsaSMasterVoicesArchiveFileName1=Oblivion - Voices1.bsaSMasterSoundsArchiveFileName=Oblivion - Sounds.bsa;SMasterTexturesArchiveFileName1=Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsaSMasterTexturesArchiveFileName2=Split Textures 2.bsaSMasterTexturesArchiveFileName1=Split Textures 1.bsa;SMasterMeshesArchiveFileName=Oblivion - Meshes.bsaSMasterMeshesArchiveFileName2=Split Meshes 2.bsaSMasterMeshesArchiveFileName1=Split Meshes 1.bsaSInvalidationFile=ArchiveInvalidation.txtiRetainFilenameOffsetTable=1iRetainFilenameStringTable=1iRetainDirectoryStringTable=1bCheckRuntimeCollisions=0bInvalidateOlderFiles=1bUseArchives=1;SArchiveList=Oblivion - Meshes.bsa, Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa, Oblivion - Sounds.bsa, Oblivion - Voices1.bsa, Oblivion - Voices2.bsa, Oblivion - Misc.bsaSArchiveList=C:\Split Meshes 1.bsa, Split Meshes 2.bsa, C:\Split Textures 1.bsa, Split Textures 2.bsa, Oblivion - Sounds.bsa, Oblivion - Voices1.bsa, Oblivion - Voices2.bsa, Oblivion - Misc.bsa

C: is an 8GB drive that I use to split my BSAs and page files. Note that SArchiveList has the full paths to the BSAs on the other drive, and the SMaster lines only have the file name.

The Ultimate Defrag tool that?s listed here is really a great little defragger. It let?s you (if you want) place all the Oblivion data close to the outer edge of your harddrive. Since hard drives have constant spin rates they read data much faster close to the edge (Some data centers have for example rather used the outer half of two 5600rpm drives than one 7200rpm drive). Since all the oblivion data also gets consolidated the seek times improve as well because the reading head has less distance to travel. Since I'm using QTP3 (Redimized) and a bunch of other mods altering the textures and what not of the world the load stuttering was sometimes really annoying, sometimes the game would slideshow for 5-10 seconds when loading new outdoor cells, even after doing a regular defrag. After setting up and doing a defrag with Ultimate I get at most a second or two of stuttering. The program is a little bit quirky to set up, but well worth it IMHO. And since there?s a freeware version it doesn?t really hurt to try it out. I would be vary placing Oblivion at the edge if I had it installed on my system partition though, since a bunch of windows files really might be even more performance critical.

Do you think a solid state drive would get rid of these issues? I think you can get nearly instant access from them.

What soundcard are you using, if any? This problem is not uncommon and you should check the hardware troubleshooting forum rather than this one. It is to do with your soundcard and drivers. have you K-lite codec pack installed? I know most people tell you to get the latest drivers for your soundcard but this is not always the case!! Have you had oblivion working fine before on the same system? If so try an older driver, may help. It did for me on my Emu 1212. There is also another app called CODEC Reset Utility v4.1 to clear / 'reset' your codecs which has been known to fix this issue. Does this happen on vanilla? I am pretty certain that it is not an oblivion problem but a problem with your computer setup.

In theory that should be the case. But right now solid state drives are still pretty expensive, and their write performance isn't as good as it could be. If you're feeling adventurous, try installing Oblivion and your mods and such to a 16GB flash stick and see if it helps

Will my ipod work too??.... :rofl:

I am going to try that, and see what happens

I just have to buy a 32gb Flash drive first.

I have a question for you knowledgeable folks out there:

Do you think there would be an advantage to installing oblivion on a wholly separate hard drive than the operating system?

Currently I have a quad core 2.66 running a Vista Ultimate 64 OS. This OS and my main game folder are on a Western Digital Velociraptor 300 gig HDD.

BUT I also have two 1 terabyte Seagate HDDs. I put the game drive on the WD thinking it better because it had a 10,000 RPM speed (faster, better) the cache on that drive though is still 16mb. The Seagate terabytes on the other hand have the same 7200 RPM as most, but the cashe is 32 mb.

So my thinking is that by installing Oblivion on an alternate physical drive from the OS drive then it would be that much more unhindered in it's running of Oblivion. Which is better a bigger cache or a faster drive? Then is having a slower drive but bigger cache that would be completely dedicated to Oblivion better than having a faster drive but lower cache that shares duties with an operating system?

If this has been asked sorry - I didn't see it.

So what say ya performance people?

And of course thanks for any help in clarifying these issues.

Since I have nothing else to do tomorrow, I'll screw around with installing Oblivion on my old(er) computer and see what kinda FPS I get with these. That compy's specs are:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+
3 GB RAM
nVidia 8500 GT (Overclocked slightly.)
Pretty old 160 GB IDE HDD.
Some Asus produced Compaq MB.

Not too powerful for this day and age, but not too puny either. Mostly just been using it for WoW.

Psymon - put it on a drive seperate to your pagefile, and have your pagefile on the fastest drive

Thanks stet, but could you say more about that - like why?

Anyone else want to take a stab at the other questions regarding cache versus speed an install location?

thanks all.

Psymon, as far as I know, cache isn't really a big deal. Sure 32MB is going to be better than 8MB, but I've never heard of it becoming an obvious difference.

Anyway, I recommend doing what I did, if possible. I have my OS on a 15GB partition on my 2 Raptors in RAID 0. I also have a 500GB Caviar Black. The first partition I made on the Caviar was an 8GB FAT32 partition. Since it was the first partition, it is placed on the outer edge (the fastest part) of the drive. 8GB is only 1.6% of 500GB, so there is a tiny sliver of hard drive that is dedicated to this FAT32 partition. I put my pagefile on this tiny sliver, so it is on the absolute fastest possible location on that hard drive (being sure that making the pagefile was the first thing I did). After that, you can put some BSAs in this tiny sliver as well, and they will be accessed very quickly!

EDIT: And Oblivion is installed on the Raptors.

Psymon - you want the pagefile on the faster drive to improve access time, and like sebastian said, if you can get it at the front of the drive then it is even faster.

The reason for having oblivion and the pagefile on seperate drives is quite simple: You don't want to interupt the drive head that is reading and writing the pagefile. For instance if you had them all on the same drive the drive head would have to move to you oblivion folder copy a segement of data, then move to the page file and write this data, which it will do many many times. At the same time the drive head is also trying to read the pagefile to copy stuff into memory. So the bonus of having them on seperate drives is that the one drivehead will concentrate on the pagefile, while the other drivehead will just read the files it needs from the oblivion folder. This speeds up copying data to the pagefile as the driveheads are not moving all over the place.

If you have enough drives, then setting up a RAID array is a good idea.

Sebastian, personally I would not put any bsa files on the partition with the pagefile. Just leave the drive head on that drive to just read and write data in the pagefile, not to fetch data. As you have Oblivion installed on the RAID drives, you have two drive heads fetching the data, leaving the pagefile to be as effiecient as it can.

OK, thanks for the tip.

So, just to make sure, will Windows always go for the pagefile on my Caviar while I'm playing Oblivion if no Oblivion data is on the Caviar? I think I read somewhere that Windows intelligently decides which pagefile to use.

Ok so I'm feeling a little slow on this.

I'm not sure i have paging active with Oblivion. Is there a way to check if I do? Where would the page file be?

Currently I have 8 gigs of ram - and I know that Oblivion can only use 2 gigs, so what would the advantage of a page file be for me?

thanks.

If you've got the second drive to spare, and you're intent on squeezing out every last millisecond of access time, then yes. Move the page file to the faster drive. The size of the drive's RAM cache is probably not terribly important. We're talking a few MB on systems that are dealing with much larger amounts of data.

You can waste time trying to then get it positioned on the outer rim, but I personally have never seen any hard numbers proving this to be any more effective than simply making sure it's a fixed size all in one chunk *SOMEWHERE* on the drive. The bigger key here is that getting it to fall in one large contiguous chunk so the disk access is smooth and not jumping all over the platters. Pick a size for the paging file that's large enough to handle 4x your physical RAM. Don't just let Windows manage it, because Windows does a lousy job of this and leads to mass fragmentation.

The same holds true for Oblivion's own files. *IF* you can get them all in one nice smoothly positioned block. This is part of why packing all your loose mod files into a BSA is helpful. The game may treat it as multiple files, but to the OS, it's just one large archive file. So the disk doesn't have to spend time bouncing around looking for everything.

Compressed vs uncompressed BSAs are more of a CPU thing. The less time the CPU has to spend deflating the info, the better.

At the end of the day though, seriously, all this is going to get you is a few milliseconds shaved off. The larger performance gains over all are going to come from optimizing your meshes and reducing your VRAM usage so that the game doesn't need to spend its life loading things from disk. I'd concentrate all efforts there and then do a good defrag.

If things are still stuttering badly after that, moving the files around various drives isn't going to solve your problems. At that point you need to be looking into upgrading the weak link.

Hmm - first off thanks

So I already have the WD velociraptor 300 split with an OS drive and a game drive. Oblivion and the OS share that drive. I have no plans of reinstalling Vista, but perhaps oblivion. Would it be that advantageous to put Oblivion on one of the Seagates (32 cache but only 7200 RPM). I actually could do that and put the page file on yet the third drive (another seagate).

-or-

as you say that is all just grasping after minimal advantages. Certainly having the OS and page file on the same drive would be easy.

I think I could actually get the reinstall of oblivion down moderately fast (being as it would be my fourth time) and then use bsa files.

The thing about bsa files -for me- is that it seems that many mods are updated continually - does that mean that the bsa files are then continually repacked? I guess that could become yet another routine right after making omods (well no it would be in place of I guess). Certainly I would want to think about how many BSAs as some things update faster than others. I could see how textures and meshes would benefit. any threads on how people have mapped that out.

Drive space is no issue for me. Plenty of that - wide open. Putting oblivion on it's own drive is not a problem nor would moving the page file (I think) - moving the OS - is. So the OS is not coming off the fastest drive and keeping the page file on it would mean that it would have to share the drive with the OS.

-or- should I first drop that 300 on upgrading to a 1gig vRam HD 4870? then see how it is.

All the problems I reported before in that other thread are mostly gone - thanks Arthmoor - your a real resource and help.