Low FPS on modern PC

[KeeperFiM]

Hi, I'm having some low framerates in the imperial city, as low as 35. Now that's not completely unplayable but on a 7+ year old game this shouldn't happen. The only mods I have are texture replacers, OBGE Liquid Water, OSR and Streamline. Disabling those mods did nothing, enabling the backgroundload and threading variables in the ini did nothing, increasing iPreloadSizeLimit and Cell Buffer values did nothing. GPU usage is 35-45%.

Could it be that even a modern computer can't overcome the bad optimization of this game?

 

Specs:
i5 4670k OC @ 4.0Ghz

16GB 1600Mhz RAM

AMD Radeon HD 7970 Ghz Edition @ Stock

[gvbgamer]

Could it be because your PC is running a 64bit OS?

[Striker879]

For years Oblivion was the benchmark for bringing hardware to it's knees. It fell out of favour not because hardware came along that could eat the game for breakfast but because new games came into favour (hard to sell Far Cry if you don't have lots of people benchmarking it and publishing their results for example).

 

So is Oblivion a hardware hog because it's poorly optimized? Maybe if you are thinking optimized in relation to modern hardware. Oblivion was optimized to run on a single core scarcely multi-threaded CPU back in the day when GHz was King. My vintage GotY disk edition has recommended specs of 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 and Geforce 6800 or higher. So you'd think your overclocked i5 should blow an ancient 3 GHz P4 away, and it would in this case except for one detail ... execution unit pipeline length. I remember even back in the days of the later versions of P4 that pipeline length in the last versions of P4 was trumped by the shorter piped early version even if they gave away a little in clock speed except when it came to multi-threaded tasks. The reason that Intel went with longer and longer execution unit pipelines was because they went with more and more execution units (when Moore's Law killed the GHz King), and it took the longer pipes and BIOS updates to keep the CPU from stalling on things like cache misses or code prediction misses. Oblivion was last updated just before the end of GHz is King and multi-threading took over the world.

 

That all said there is still much you can do with some research on here, leveraging the hard won knowledge of others. Search for threads similar to yours ... scarcely a month goes by without at least one or two popping up. Some offer good advice, others no so good. A lot of where you wind up will depend on what your "must have" mods are, and how those mods hammer framerate.

Edited January 6, 2014 by Striker879

[Deleted3619564User]

Remove the osr and the streamline. You don't need them with your hardware. Streamline changes values in oblivion.ini, it's not enough disabling it to reset the state. Delete the oblivion.ini in my games folder and run oblivion. It will be recreated with default values. Set iNumHavokThreads to 4 (four core for i5 processor) and iThreads to 16 (the i5 has 4 threads per core) in oblivion.ini for optimal values. You have some caps in something, because oblivion without mods (even if it is not optimized for newer hardware) must run at 60 fps on your rig.

[KeeperFiM]

Could it be because your PC is running a 64bit OS?

I don't know how that would affect it. Oblivion won't be able to take advantage of the 64 bit architecture but that's it as far as I know.

[KeeperFiM]

For years Oblivion was the benchmark for bringing hardware to it's knees. It fell out of favour not because hardware came along that could eat the game for breakfast but because new games came into favour (hard to sell Far Cry if you don't have lots of people benchmarking it and publishing their results for example).

 

So is Oblivion a hardware hog because it's poorly optimized? Maybe if you are thinking optimized in relation to modern hardware. Oblivion was optimized to run on a single core scarcely multi-threaded CPU back in the day when GHz was King. My vintage GotY disk edition has recommended specs of 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 and Geforce 6800 or higher. So you'd think your overclocked i5 should blow an ancient 3 GHz P4 away, and it would in this case except for one detail ... execution unit pipeline length. I remember even back in the days of the later versions of P4 that pipeline length in the last versions of P4 was trumped by the shorter piped early version even if they gave away a little in clock speed except when it came to multi-threaded tasks. The reason that Intel went with longer and longer execution unit pipelines was because they went with more and more execution units (when Moore's Law killed the GHz King), and it took the longer pipes and BIOS updates to keep the CPU from stalling on things like cache misses or code prediction misses. Oblivion was last updated just before the end of GHz is King and multi-threading took over the world.

 

That all said there is still much you can do with some research on here, leveraging the hard won knowledge of others. Search for threads similar to yours ... scarcely a month goes by without at least one or two popping up. Some offer good advice, others no so good. A lot of where you wind up will depend on what your "must have" mods are, and how those mods hammer framerate.

Yeah that makes a lot of sense, optimized for older hardware, thanks

I uninstalled all my mods, the game, deleted everything in documents\my games\oblivion and appdata\oblivion and reinstalled

Booted the game up with no mods or tweaks. There is a little improvement from the modded game I was running and it looks like I'll have to look around for a real fix

[KeeperFiM]

Remove the osr and the streamline. You don't need them with your hardware. Streamline changes values in oblivion.ini, it's not enough disabling it to reset the state. Delete the oblivion.ini in my games folder and run oblivion. It will be recreated with default values. Set iNumHavokThreads to 4 (four core for i5 processor) and iThreads to 16 (the i5 has 4 threads per core) in oblivion.ini for optimal values. You have some caps in something, because oblivion without mods (even if it is not optimized for newer hardware) must run at 60 fps on your rig.

I'll try without Streamline but I need OSR for the 64hz fix. I'll try your tweak suggestions as well.

[Deleted3619564User]

Ok, so disable managing fps in osr. You can do it by the ini file in obse plugin folder.

[KeeperFiM]

Ok, so disable managing fps in osr. You can do it by the ini file in obse plugin folder.

Yep, that's the first thing I always did with the stutter removers for the Fallout games.

Anyway, I figured out the problem. Enabling the 4 extra water reflections variables in the ini kills performance. I assumed they wouldn't matter because I thought they would be processed on the GPU not the CPU but I was wrong. I guess water reflections are a CPU effect in this game.

[Striker879]

Wondering for my own info ... are you talking about these vanilla Oblivion.ini variables:

 

bUseWaterReflectionsMisc=1

bUseWaterReflectionsStatics=1

bUseWaterReflectionsTrees=1

bUseWaterReflectionsActors=1