Heya! Im trying to play one last Oblivion game before Skyrim, and spent a day carefully building an install with a large number of mods. (175 esps before Wryebashing, 5.5go of texture overrides, etc)

Whilst playable and stable at first glance, unfortunately outdoors performance is a bit disappointing, even after toning down shadows and water a bit. My PC isnt brand new either (3.2ghz duocore, 4gb ram, 9800GTX+) but I assumed it could handle a high level of modding.

Anyhow, out of curiosity, I'd like to know; do you think the graphic card or the CPU is the more likely bottleneck on this setup? I'm tempted to upgrade my old video card regardless for Skyrim, but I wanna be fairly sure that its the issue first.

CPU is pretty much always the bottleneck for everyone. Oblivion is poorly optimised, and doesn't handle more than one core. So even if you have the best processor in the world, you'll still get slowdowns with groups of NPCs about, it's just how the game is.

Out of curiosity, what is your normal FPS? And what does it drop to when outdoors and "sluggish"?

Well, 3.2GHz Core 2 Duo or DuoCore? There is a noticable difference, but not so much with Oblivion (since it's single core only). The multiple core happens during your video driver's code. How much ram is on that 9800? 1GB DDR3?

Without knowing what OS you have (if you have XP, the 4GB is good, if not, it's going to suffer badly). Windows Vista and 7 need 4 to start out with (and playing games will suffer at 4). You need 64 bit to run anything higher than 4GB, so if you have Vista or 7, time to upgrade to 8GB and 64bit, but there are issues with OBSE and 64bit, nothing you can't get around though.

How bad was your frame rate outdoors? I typically see 40 to 70 depending on the scenery I'm looking at, I also have done the Shader 3.0 force on. Now mods that add more people to the game will lower frame rate more than anything else, because of the time needed for them to "do things", pathing seems to really hit hard, so avoid having mods that add a lot of extra people. The road travelers mod I had on also caused exterior slowdowns, with that gone, I noticed not only did the game run better (less crashes), but the outside performance was better as well. I actually downsized my mod list (130ish now from 240s) and most of the people mods are gone, save for a few, most of the mods I have now are locations, quests, clothing, armor and race mods. The game runs better for it and even though there are less people around, still plays fine.

My texture folder is 16.4gb and most of it is all high resolution texture replacements, textures with a good graphics card with a lot of ram, won't really be an issue, most of the frame rate slowdown is caused by mods doing too much stuff, mostly game alterations and npcs.

You should get Oblivion Stutter Remover, and that will definitely improve performance.

With a beast of a system built for modded Oblivion (i7 930, Nvidia GTX480, 80 GB SSD), I still get 20-30 FPS (sometimes dipping to 15 or so), but then again I am using 254+ mods (about 60 or so additionally merged). This is a FCOM++ with OBGE, UL, BC and RAEVWD with great many higher texture replacers. But 20-30 FPS is not bad for this game at all

Its Core Duo, sorry. And its true that this is my first time playing Oblivion on Windows 7 32bit, I used to always play on XP. Perhaps the higher OS ram overhead affects the gaming more than I thought it would, more testing needed. My card has 764 video ram.

I did install Ob Stutter Remover, actually, but I just tweaked the ini a bit, will give this a try.

As for FPS, I'm getting 25-28 at best in indoors areas, whereas it can fall around 12-15 outdoors and 8-10 if I'm fighting outdoors (this is where it gets really annoying - plus I havent been near an oblivion gate yet and thats always worse). I tried to pick texture packs that wouldnt tax the system too much, for instance, my version of Qarls is the "reduced, redimized" one which is much less taxing visually. I do play with Unique Landscapes too, which may affect performance, but I installed lower poly grass and optimized meshes that should have negated this by far and large.

I just tried playing with the taskmanager open on a second monitor, and I do notice that my first core is always running at 100% whenever I experience some stutter or fps drop, so I'm guessing its the CPU thats my bottleneck mostly. Going to crank up the OC a bit and see if it helps at all.

Hope Skyrims going to be optimized better! FO3 and New Vegas run flawless even if heavily modded on my computer, so theres hope yet.

Is there any possibility that the mod "Fake Fullscreen Mode Windowed - Alt Tab Fix", even tho it advertises improved performance, actually gives me significantly worse FPS than real fullscreen play?

I may be imagining it, but I was going through many mods trying to find culprits and disabling this seems to make things much better...

Well if you're ALT + TABing out of the game, that implies you're doing something else in the background, which will be eating up precious system resources Oblivion should be using.

This statement is false. Especially where mods are concerned, graphical concerns are almost always the greater cause of performance problems. AI is a sometimes-close second, especially with large groups of NPCs loaded at once (towns, mostly), but mods usually add more graphical difficulties than they do processing problems, and for the most part graphics were the bigger source of slowdown to begin with.

Of course. But a typical user will generally receive greater slowdowns because of NPCs and AI (for example an FCOM install will kill a lot of systems, whilst most will cope fine with QTP3 and a few other texture packs).

Well, getting rid of the fullscreen/windowed mod and playing in "true" fullscreen is REALLY much better so I've resolved to do that for this playthrough even if its not ultra-convenient!

Even outside, near water, in large fights, my FPS remains in a really acceptable range this way.

Thanks for the help all.

I'm not sure I would call that false. I can quite easily bog my system down to a crawl by adding mods that place numerous NPCs into the world. Adding tons of texture replacers and other graphics related mods only bothers it with a video card that has insufficient VRAM. The only real exception for graphics, obviously, is RAEVWD due to the enormous number of polygons it adds if used in full.

Same system, running Fallout 3 has zero problem with stupidly large numbers of NPCs being around. I can only attribute this to the fact that Fallout 3 actually utilizes more than one CPU core and so the game is left free to deal with more of the things it needs to deal with. Plus I'm fairly certain they optimized AI performance on top of that. AI is obviously a CPU-bound function. I can even make use of stupidly large resolution texture packs and that causes absolutely no difference in the performance.

The sad fact is, Oblivion is just a pig when it comes to CPU, and only using one core just makes things that much worse.

It is the CPU that is, in my experience, the "typical bottleneck".

The only realistic way to even try to (somewhat) overcome this inherent limitation, is to ensure that you have an efficient CPU running at a high clock speed, kill off unnecessary background applications and services, use Oblivion Stutter Remover, and limit your scripting/AI/NPC/creature mods to a small number, these being preferably of the well-written variety.

Graphics is a rather more clear cut affair, given that you can track both VRAM usage and FPS with ease. Unintalling a single texture replacer - or more than one - will, most often, have nothing to do with load orders, Bashed Patches, and saved games. Far more simple and painless, to adjust the setup to one's GPU specifications.

In case you missed it above:



In regards to the CPU/GPU bottleneck debate, I've had more experience/come across more people bottlenecked via the CPU. The main reason being, like what Arthmoor has said, the issue of cores. Before the SandyBridge Intel CPUs came out, and to a lesser extent for the AMD cards, there were some mid to high end cards that had 2 or 4 CPUs, but clocked at a relatively low speed, which screwed a lot of people over Oblivion wise. Most people think mainly about the GPU when thinking about gaming performance, so normally people that want to run Oblivion on fairly high settings come quite well equipped in terms of the GPU, and presume that their multi-core, but not necessarily highly clocked CPUs, will be able to handle Oblivion.

Barring REAVWD, and some more performance demanding OBGE mods, the GPU is normally OK, but the CPU can never really handle too much AI.

Hey there! Im returning to Oblivion after quite some time, now on W7 64bits..Out of curiosity, what would be the issue of OBSE and 64bits, and how would I deal with it?


Thanks!

There is no issue with using obse and 64-bit Windows.

In fact, the post you quoted from is riddled with inaccuracies and peculiar baseless assertions. I advise viewing it with due scepticism.

This. I have 64-bit Windows 7 and have had absolutely no problems with OBSE.

I would just like to point out that I currently have oblivion running quite smoothly on a PC with Windows 7 64-bit installed and 2GB RAM. In my tests so far, my FPS in the wilderness is capped by Oblivion Stutter Remover to 30. It only really suffers when there are numerous NPCs and creatures on screen.

I have a Pentium D 945 @ 3.4GHz and a GeForce 9800 w 512MB VRAM. My mod list ATM consists of OOO, Vibrant Textures and a few other minor gameplay tweaks and graphics enhancement mods.

Even Qarl's Redimized texture pack will quickly use up your graphic card's memory. When GPU memory runs out, your hard drive will be accessed to move the extra data, which is a magnitude slower. My 8800 GTX has 768 MB of memory and it was running out of memory with QTP3 Redimized, Unique Landscapes, and Better Cities running at the same time. Without QTP3 my framerates went back to playable because thrashing was no longer occuring. Your 9800 GTX+ actually only has 512 MB of memory, so I'd imagine that your performance deteriorates a lot quicker. I'd try Vibrant Textures instead, which in my opinion look better than QTP3 anyway. The only problem is the normal maps are not as detailed as I'd like, so I use Bomret's better normal maps along with it. OBGE with any shaders active can produce the same problem.

An easy way to know if your GPU is running out of memory is to run GPU-Z with the sensors tab open, check to have it update in the background, and run Oblivion in a window at a slightly smaller resolution than you run full screen. For example, I'll run it at 1680x1050 in windowed mode while my desktop is 1920x1080. Move GPU-Z to the right side of the screen and watch the memory usage.

One of the reasons Fallout appears to run better than Oblivion is because there are no world texture replacers of the magnitude of QTP3 as far as I'm aware. If you run Fallout 3 or New Vegas and Oblivion back-to-back in their vanilla state, you'd most likely get the same performance.

Actually, there are;

That is not true. Fallout is massively more optimized than Oblivion is, and vanilla FO runs a lot better than Vanilla Oblivion does.



This. As far as I am aware there a texture overhauls for Fallout with higher res textures than QTP.

It's also not entirely correct that running out of VRAM results in drive thrashing. Usually it results in the game falling back on system RAM instead, which is generally slower than VRAM. Only when BOTH get exhausted does it try (and fail miserably) to fall back on virtual disk. Even so, the swap to system RAM is often enough to destabilize the game enough to crash it.

Also, I'm using a very comprehensive texture pack for FO3 which replaces at least as much, if not more, than QTP3 did and most of it is twice the resolution of QTP3 Full. Game doesn't care. It still runs like a dream.

In my case at least, even when I was using a GT220 with my current processor, I always ran into a CPU bottleneck, evidenced by the fact that I couldn't use water reflection without dropping into the unplayable frame rates. When I upgraded to my current GPU, I got no improvement in performance whatsoever and was still unable to use water reflections and maintain a playable frame rate until I significantly lowered my RAEVWD load.

Also, I get the same effect with FO3 as Arthmoor does; the game doesn't give a damn if I blow my texture memory limit by a mile with high-res replacers (and I've only got 786 mb of texture memory for that matter) and is always sitting at 30 frames per second where I capped it, and even during the mists of a MMM night ghoul rampage with generic spawn rates at 3-5 and ghoul spawn rates at an extra x5 on top of that with fighting EVERYWHERE, I see no slowdown at all (but doing that does cause more CTD's, which seems to be related to the extra amounts of AI's running because turning the spawn rates down to 1-3 solves the problem, so something, somewhere, is giving out).