Oblivion FPS Drop

[nicktheduke]

Hi everyone

 

I posted this in the General Discussion but wanted to try here as well. I know this is a topic that has been exhausted. I know I'm pretty exhausted myself.

Played and finished Oblivion on 360 years back and picked it back up on Steam holiday sale for the enjoyable yet frustrating experience of modding it.

 

After spending 2 weeks of playing with Wrye Bash/TESEdit/OBMM/BOSS, I finally got everything in order correctly. Sure, Oblivion Character Overhaul might sometimes make Dark Elves a tad black as if they're missing textures, but hey, it works!

 

However, my main concern is the FPS. I have the game running off Windows 8 Boot Camp on a late 2012 Mac Mini with 2.6ghz Intel Core i7, 16gb RAM & the Intel HD graphics 4000 card. Yes, I am aware that Oblivion runs on a single-core. Yes, I am aware of the issue with having an integrated graphics card.

 

I've installed the 4GB patch, Wiseman reduced textures, OSR, and streamline. I also have some Combat FPS boosters running. I've tweaked the .ini file which I've attached. I've also attached my load order, as well as my streamline and OSR config.

 

With all this, the game starts off pretty smooth. Outdoors is where the FPS gets hit the hardest but somehow I've managed to get it up to about 40-50 FPS. Right now I don't care about high definition glamour. I just want performance. So I'll begin to walk around and the game is handled smoothly. And then somehow for some reason after about 10 minutes of play, the game just drops to about 10-18 FPS and never regains momentum.

So I dug deeper. I installed Razer Game Booster. I installed Core Parking Manager. I installed Throttlestop. I installed Process Lasso. I decided to run the game in windowed mode at lower resolution. Still, no avail. And what makes it worse is the fact that the process monitor shows that my CPU nor RAM is barely even used. So I guess that rules out memory leak.

 

This pretty much makes the game unplayable and is pretty frustrating. I haven't even made it past Level 1 because eventually I just give up. I can reload and the game starts fine again but then it drops.

 

Right now, I'm debating on building a DIY external GPU just so I can play this game. But before I do that, I'd like to please ask the forums if there is anything else I can do to fix this problem.

 

So, do I have any more options outside of buying a new GPU?

 

Please let me know. Thanks for your time :)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Lanceor]

Since it slows down over time, could it be a heat issue? Or running out of RAM?

[bben46]

Installing more than one program that claims to speed up your system is probably not helping. Most of those do the same things - disable some background programs - but they are background programs themselves - Pick the one that you think works best and turn the rest off.

 

You said it starts at a high FPS - if you see that in the tutorial, that is not unusual as the intro dungeon is very linear and optimized better - and there is no LOD or some of the other fps eating features until after you exit the grate at the end of the intro part. After you get out into the game world the fps can drop quite a bit. Try backing off on the video settings to see if that helps or not - especially shadows - set all of the shadows to completely off for testing and lower the other features - You may want to turn streamline off for this as it will try to turn things back on - it works by swapping fps for eye candy on the fly - this can result in temporary fps increases - or temporary visual improvements as you play. I ran with streamline on an older computer - and was constantly blindsided by bandits appearing out of nowhere and often never saw a fort until I was on top of it. Then I turned streamline off and made my own changes in the ini using this guide - http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_1.html

[nicktheduke]

hi all

 

thanks for the replies.

 

so unfortunately it doesn't slow down over time and i'm not referring to intro dungeon that leads out of the imperial sewer at start of the game. this is mainly outdoors as well. interiors seem to be fine. i can go anywhere in the game and it starts off fine but then the drop happens :(

 

for instance, i'm in the wilderness north of chorrol on a mages guild quest and when i load, it starts at about 40-60 FPS but after running around for 10-15 minutes, it drops down to 10-20 FPS and stays there.

 

@bben46, i'll try turning off some of those programs and i also tweaked my ini file based on that guide you mentioned which i attached in my initial post. do you have a chance to see if everything is correct? i've turned off FPS management and streamsight in streamline but sometimes it seems to still be trying to manage or swap distance for FPS... could this be the culprit?

 

or, does it really boil down to turning down grass, trees, shadows, etc? i can try that again but i installed low poly grass and reduced grass density and i always keep my shadows at 0 or 1. this is what i find so confusing. shouldn't my memory be able to handle this? or is it purely handled by GPU?

 

also, this might be a noob question but why does the process monitor indicate that my CPU/RAM/etc is barely being used? i'd like to throw everything i have at the game but i'm being told i'm only using about 15% of my system resources when i play. is it a windows 8 issue? is there any way to fix this?

 

thanks again. i appreciate any help!

[discovery1]

i note from your load order you have 2 water mods active, obge and hd water. You could start by disabling one of those. However I believe the main culprit is your intel hd 4000 card. Not the best gaming card, it may be getting hot due to the need to quickly render oblivions open world graphics. Even with mid resolution the card has to perform some increasingly heavy calculations as your character looks around and the game world and swamps the gpu memory. The hotter the card gets, the slower it runs. One trick you can try is to bring up the console and type "pcb" then return, close console. This will purge the cell buffers but who wants to keep doing that during gameplay? streamline does do this but is not effective all the time.The only real solution is to buy a proper gaming card

preferably with 2gb memory (although 1gb is fine) and as much bus width as you lay your hands on. The bigger the card memory, the more textures it can store without constantly reloading, the wider the bus width, the quicker it can render them without stuttering etc. Just be aware that there are a few 2-3gb cards out there that sound like the dogs *censored*, but are just not up to running open world graphics. The nvidia 3gb geforce 560 was a totally awseome sounding card but is actually awful. Look on "toms hardware list" somewhere on there it lists all the cards in a league table form as regards gaming ability and price.

 

Your ini by the way looks ok to me, it is not exactly demanding.

[nicktheduke]

@discovery1

 

i'm actually looking into building an eGPU just to fix this problem because the intel 4000 is horrendous!!!!

 

thanks for such a thorough explanation! really appreciate it :smile:

Edited January 17, 2014 by nicktheduke