Optimising Oblivion

[Moire]

This is a good thread about optimizing and stabilizing with many useful tips and not as old as the one on the first page - http://sites.google.com/site/oblivionpoinfo/stabilization/oblivion

[tqquan]

Thanks for the help

[MorpheusDruidic]

This worked wonders for my game aside from my .ini tweaks graphics extenders etc..

 

Oblivion Ram Booster (It allows my game to utilize more available system memory when upping the ipreloadsizelimit didn't really seem to do much)

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=32405

[TheMightyElo]

I finished reading through this thread and I am a little confused on which site I am supposed to go to (sorry for being stupid). All of these sites to to show how to optimize Oblivion, but which do you guys use? Which one is the most up-to-date?

 

http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_1.html

 

http://sites.google.com/site/oblivionpoinfo/index

 

http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/Feature/36546,optimising-oblivion-v20.aspx

 

http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/Feature/36919,optimising-oblivion-v30-into-modblivion.aspx

[Wordsmith]

I just posted a notice about a draft setup doc for Microsoft Security Essentials over on the tech help section - if it's of interest follow the instructions there and I'll send a copy. Edited January 25, 2011 by Wordsmith

[powerbrite]

All of the suggestions in this thread are decent, but I'd like to point out the most overlooked problem that all of these "next generation games" suffer from:

 

Hard drive thrashing and bottlenecks.

 

The fastest video card, the most overclocked memory and CPU, the most tricked-out file tweaks... none of those juicy little strategies will do you very much good if your system spends time waiting for a bunch of disk-swapping to finish.

 

You can test this problem on your own computer. Load up a system-intensive game like Oblivion, then fast travel right away to a new, outdoor area. Now, without moving forward or backward, spin your character around in a full 360-degree circle on-axis. Most people will notice a few hangs or pauses of varying severity, as their character's FOV rotates and new scenery comes into view. This is due to the enormous amount of data being shuttled back-and-forth between your hard drive and the rest of your system. The higher your graphical settings are, the more severe this problem will be. It's an enormous amount of data and it all has to be loaded from compressed files on your hard disk... on the fly.

 

Now, without moving, spin your character once again in the same place. You'll likely see no such pauses or hangs this time, or they'll at least be greatly diminished as compared to the first time. Why..? Because that scene (and its associated data) is now loaded into fast memory and is mainly being rendered from there.

 

As soon as you change your character's location, this proceess begins all over again. We've all seen the negative effect that this ongoing process has upon framerates and gameplay, as we run across the Oblivion landscape from one town or fort to another. Changing the settings in Oblivion.ini like "GridsToLoad" and so forth can help a little with this issue, but they are by no means the best approach to the problem.

 

Unfortunately, the actual "fix" for this issue is both expensive and time-consuming...

 

Setting up your system to run on a PAIR of very fast SATA hard drives is the first step towards alleviating this problem of massive disk swapping (and its resulting bottlenecks). Those drives should then be configured as a RAID 0 array. Oblivion and your other games should be run entirely from that array. By having a pair of drives operating in tandem, the data can be swapped back and forth at an enormously faster rate and your gameplay will be incredibly improved overall.

 

Here's an example of a gaming rig that I've recently built. This system takes these issues into account and should provide an example of what to shoot for. It is by no means "the ideal mega-system," but is merely being presented as a general guideline:

 

http://tessmage.com/tessforum/viewtopic.php?t=228

 

So... before anyone trots down to the store and plunks down a wad of cash on the latest video card... and before you burn up your computer by massively overclocking everything to death... take a look at your harddrives and think twice about where to spend your money. 8)

 

 

- Tessera -

[powerbrite]

hi new to this site your right about the bottle necks i spent fortune on ram gpu,s ,try a raptar hard drive makes the games run a hell a lot faster ive only gott one 250 and no raid still made a big diffrence,

[bben46]

This thread is a bit out of date - by about 5 years. :whistling:

 

However, tweakguides.com is still by far the best, and is kept up to date. - The Oblivion section was last updated December 2010. It also has sections for optimizing many other games as well as Windows, graphics cards and Firefox. :thumbsup:

[nohj]

im using ati mobility radeon hd 4250 which says it has 893 mb hyper memory but my vid ram is only 256 im struggling to get a steady 30 fps, any advice please?

[bben46]

Have you gone to the Tweakguides yet?

Be sure to follow the instructions and tweak your Operating system first, video system second and game last - as just tweaking the game without first doing the OS & Vid may miss a lot that could help with FPS.