GetOutOfBox

Uh, there's really no need to download the DirectX SDK, Mediacoder can convert xwm files just fine. Here's the details of one of the files according to Mediacoder: File: mus_sovngarde_chant_lp.xwm Audio(0): wmav2 Bitrate: 48 kbps Sample Rate: 44100 Channel: Stereo (2) Length: 211 seconds To convert the audio to another format, make sure to set "Audio Source" to Ffmpeg, and the Container type to "Default". Other than that, just choose whatever codec you want and convert away.

Registry cleaning has been proven many times to be complete BS (at least in regards to real-world-performance). Unless the registry is taking up most of the hard drive (which it won't), there's no way it could be a performance bottleneck. Most programs use the registry merely for misc. information storage (i.e settings, program paths, etc), and hence make very little use of it.

He's not, at least in the screenshots. The issue is that he, like most sane people, thinks that the vanilla face textures look like something out of a medical textbook of exotic skin diseases. The solution is this mod (or one of the many others): New Face Textures

Sounds like a video card issue. Your card is probably overheating, or you have incorrect drivers/out of date drivers installed. Could you post your PC's specs?

You can also try the following commands: Set PCVampire to 0 Set vampire.hasdisease to 0

That probably won't solve all of your problems. Although your video card has a lot of RAM, it's other specs are not so good (I have no idea why they made a 2GB VRAM 5570 card, when it's GPU-Clock and Memory Clock will drag down performance and make the extra GB near useless). You should also post your other specs. The video card is not the only component relevent to gaming, what CPU do you have? How about what hard drive? What RAM (and how much)? What motherboard? Etc, etc.

Probably a mod conflict. Try running BOSS if you haven't already. If that doesn't work, use OBMM's conflict checker and slowly walk through your list of mods to discover conflicts (mods always conflict with Oblivion.esm, and keep in mind mod modules will conflict without actually creating problems).

Do you by any chance have Oblivion installed on a separate drive than your OS? If so, check to make sure the drives permissions are set correctly. Users/Admins/System should have "Full Control" over the drive. To check the permissions, right-click the drive and select "Properties". Select the "Security" tab and make sure that all users have "Full Control" checked. There's no reason all accounts shouldn't be able to write/read/delete/etc data on the drive, unless you're using a public computer. The reason that whether or not Oblivion is installed on your system drive or not is relevant is because if it's on the same drive, you'd be having a lot more problems if the permissions were screwed up. If it's a separate drives, things might be a little less obvious. P.S Changing the drive permissions does not change/remove "account privileges" (i.e some programs requiring an admin account, as they change sensitive OS settings), it merely changes which users can write/read/append data to the drive. You aren't increasing the risk of malware infection by changing these settings.

Why do you use OBGEv1? OBGEv2 is no more performance intensive as long as you disable the extra shaders, and in fact has performance improvements/bugfixes :P

First of all, of course the 360 version of the game is going to run smoothly. The console versions were designed to work smoothly on console hardware. When it comes to PC's, its not as easy for developers, as they have to balance performance for those with low-end PC's and quality for those with high-end PC's. Comparing the vanilla PC Oblivion to the 360 version is stupid, let alone a heavily modded version of Oblivion. And the reason why performance rises when you're in menu's/inventory is because the renderer halts when a menu item appears (i.e quest update, open inventory, etc). The same thing happens when you minimize Oblivion. The reason why looking at the sky/ground causes FPS to rise is because most games made in the last 8 or so years do not render everything currently in a scene, only what you're looking at. There's variations of this concept, but they all work for the same goal, that the scene is streamed into RAM rather than everything being preloaded (for Oblivion that would be impossible). There are several issues with your specs: 1. You have a Caviar Green hard drive. Those have an RPM of 5900, which means slow data reads/writes. You're probably going to notice stuttering in open world games like Oblivion/Crysis if you install them on that drive, regardless of what video card you have. For a gaming drive, you should have at least 7200RPM and 32MB of drive cache. If you want the best performance, go with a high-quality SSD, like the Patriot Inferno. 2.Your video card is not powerful enough to handle all of the mods you listed while keeping a high framerate. It will run out of Video RAM pretty quickly when running RAEVWD and QTP3, especially if you have AA/AF enabled. 3. Your RAM is high-latency. Bandwidth is important, but not if it comes at the cost of a high CAS latency. Yours has a CAS latency of 9ms. For good real world performance (synthetic benchmarks like PCMark or SiSoft Sandra don't really indicate how well RAM will work in practical situations), it's better to go with lower bandwidth and a lower latencies rather than high bandwidth-high latency. Optimally the CAS latency should be around 6-7 with bandwidth between 1000-1300mhz (you can still get 1600 DDR3 memory with a CAS latency of 6, but you'd have to spend a lot more). 4.Your CPU is decent for multicore games, but since Oblivion doesn't really multithread anything of importance, it's stuck with using only one of your CPU's cores. That means that you are effectively running Oblivion on a 2.5GHZ CPU, 500 mhz less than the reccomended specs. Of course, the architecture improvements of the Core 2 series will still keep you a good deal above a 2.5GHZ Pentium 4 in terms of performance, that's still a bottleneck. Either overclock to at least 3GHZ, or buy a new CPU. It basically comes down to this, if you want to run Oblivion at the best possible graphics (with mods), you're going to have to have high-performance versions of most of the main componenents. Unlike most games, hard drive speed and CPU speed are very important for solid performance (all modern games still require a good CPU/harddrive/etc, but most are very GPU intensive, whereas Oblivion manages to stress all of the systems components). If you want to run a heavily modded Oblivion and get more than 30FPS, you're going to have to spend a ton of cash.

A new video card is probably a good idea (I suggest a Radeon 6870, great performance for the money, you can get one for around $199). Your Radeon 4870 should easily be able to handle vanilla Oblivion, but a heavily modded Oblivion is an entirely different beast. Adding a mod like Qarls Texture Pack adds a bunch of potential bottlenecks, your harddrive may not be fast enough to serve up the larger texture files to your video card, or your video cards memory may be to slow, your motherboards QPI/HyperTransport to slow, etc, etc. I suggest purchasing an SSD to put your performance intensive games on, that will allow for much quicker loads, and less stuttering. A new video card will reduce the performance penalty of shader intensive mods like OBGE and allow for less stuttering as larger textures are loaded into memory.

http://i219.photobucket.com/albums/cc225/Kenori_Merrik/Necro.jpg

I have a Radeon 6870 1GB (almost 1GHZ GPU clock, 1.2GHZ memory clock), a Phenom 2 X4, 4GB of DDR2-800 RAM, a Creative X-Fi Titanium sound card (dedicated sound card alleviates the feet-sound-causing-lag issue a lot of people have), an SSD for my OS (Windows 7), an SSD for Oblivion, a hard drive dedicated to the page file, a 1TB drive for storage. Despite all of this, I still only get around 25-30 FPS, though admittedly I have heavily modded Oblivion (Animated Windows and Chimneys, OBGE /w SSAO, SSIL, Bokeh DoF. QTP3, Hi-Res plant textures, Better Cities and RAEVWD), still Crysis runs much better than Oblivion, even on a tweaked Ultra-High setting with 4x AA, 8x AF and Rygels HD texture pack. The thing that makes Oblivion so laggy even on amazing rigs is the CPU. Oblivion barely makes use of the extra core in a dual core processor, let alone tri/quad-cores. Therefore the clock rate per core is more important than the amount of cores. Since the reccomened CPU for Oblivion was a 3GHZ Pentium 4, if you want to run Oblivion with lots of mods you should aim for a 3.8GHZ CPU, or even overclock to 4.2GHZ if you can.

Yeah, the DPI-scaling issue used to happen to me in Crysis, it didn't effect aim, since mouse positioning is irrelevent in aiming (its simply movement direction), but using the in-game UI (i.e changing gun configs, using the main menu) was infuriatingly difficult. That simple fix made everything better :). It also may remove a performance drain, as unneeded DPI scaling can bog down the video card.

Agreed, and unclean nifs. I once removed 143 bogus nodes from a mesh I downloaded. Then took a minute or two to Stripify, in nifskope usually don't take all that long to stripify. I was like, wuh!? I take it everyone here is an ATI user? Cuz I would like to know about my 9800 gt, of which I have a matching pair. I have not installed the second, because I could use it in another machine. But I would like to utilize it if I get ANY kind of performance boost. As Oblivion was advertised as being SLI compatible and you see this line in the "RenderInfo.txt" file in the same directory as Oblivion.ini: SLI mode : no (I have a Radeon card, so obviously there's no SLI ;) ) one can assume Oblivion is optimized (at least according to Bethseda standards, lol) for SLI and will probably perform better on SLI than Crossfire. Still, video card architecture has changed a lot since Oblivion's time, so those optimizations may now be meaningless and hence Crossfire and SLI could be on equal footing.

i have posted in many forums, and the answers are the same. my graphic card is dying. i "just" have to buy a new one :sad: Your card may not necessarily be "dieing", it may simply be overheating. Try opening your case (unplug your PC and your monitor first) and cleaning dust off all of the components using a Q-Tip dipped in alcohol (NOT water). Pay special attention to vents and fans, making sure to remove "dust-bunnies" (chunks of dust) from the vents and off of the fan blades. Use a thin utensil like a pair of tweezers/nail-clippers to remove dust-chunks from the fins of the CPU heatsink, and your video card heatsink. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, take your computer to any local technician/computer repair store (do not go to any corporate store, as they are evil when it comes to prices), and ask them to clean the dust out of your computer. Tell them the internet said to pay close attention to the CPU and Video Card heatsinks, and to make sure they (the heatsinks) are properly seated. If they're really nice, they may do it for free (it's something that takes 20 minutes tops to do, with minimal effort), though they'll probably ask for $15-$20. They shouldn't ask for more than $35 (even that's overpriced for something as easy as cleaning dust out of a PC). Your video card may actually be dieing, but it's also equally possible that it is overheating. White dots is a common symptom of overheating components, though it is also a common symptom of dieing components. It could be either one. Still, it's worth getting a cleaning and check-up rather than spending $150-$220 for a new video card that will do games justice.

NPC's walking into each other isn't all that rare, even in an un-modded Oblivion. It happens when the Guard NPC's schedule script fails to start/hangs, the guard will just stand their doing nothing, or his script will start later than it should, resulting in him screwing up other NPC's by bumping into them/blocking them. The only (temporary) fix is to restart Oblivion, or just wait for the problem to resolve (wait for IC to be cleared from caches, you can accelerate this by fast-traveling to a bunch of different cities/locations, eventually the IC will be cleared from the game's cache as it fills with new data).

Go to Oblivion's directory in "Program Files", right click the executable (Oblivion.exe), select "Properties", and in the window that opens, click the "Compatibility" tab. Now select the boxes("check" them): "Disable Visual Themes", "Disable Desktop Compisition", and "Disable display scaling on high DPI resolutions". Click "Apply", then try starting Oblivion. I always select the first two boxes for games, as you may get a tiny, tiny performance boost from disabling the Windows Aero theme while in games, the 3rd option is one that often indirectly fixes mouse issues in games.

That's what I assumed as well, but it actually does increase the shadow filtering setting. The reasoning behind this is that the iShadowFilter ini setting determines the factor at which Gaussian Blur is applied to self-shadows. A higher setting results in much more blurred edges, while a lower setting results in more sharper (though often jaggier) edges. If you don't believe me, try it yourself. Enable Self-Shadowing in Oblivion, exit, change the iShadowFilter setting to 10. Self-shadow edges should be much blurrier (Sharper is preferable, but unfortunately Oblivion does not apply Anti-Aliasing to shadow edges, so reducing the amount of blur will just make the shadows jaggier). I'll attach a screenshot later, if I have time. As for the OP's original problem, you can try reinstalling your video card's drivers, uninstalling Oblivion, removing the data folder, and reinstalling (plus install the correct patch). Though as everyone has said, even when carefully tweaked, self-shadowing looks ugly, and it pretty buggy. Sometimes self-shadows clip with armor, shimmer, etc, so it's best to keep them disabled.

Make sure you have the latest Visual C++ runtimes, which is 2010. If you have a 64-bit operating system, install the 64-bit version as well as the 32-bit version (x86/x64). Links: Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x86) Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x64) (Only install this if you have a 64-bit operating system installed. If you're not sure if you do, open the start menu, right click "Computer", and select "Properties". In the window that opens, there should be a line: "System-type:". If the text beside it says "64-bit operating system", install both the x86 download, and the x64 download. If it says "32-bit Operating System" only install the x86 download.) Uninstall all older versions of the runtime (2005/2008, etc).

Don't expect greatness from Skyrim in terms of technological features, the game will still be in DirectX 9, despite the fact that DirectX 9 is 8 years old, DirectX 10 has come and gone and we're now on DirectX 11. The game is going to look "pretty much the same as the console versions" according to developer Todd Howard. I'll bet money that it's going to have multicore support just as shitty as Oblivion's, and I'd be amazed if it included a 64-bit executable. Sure, it's going to look better than Oblivion (hopefully), but it's not going to be a big step up. I don't know what's with Bethseda making a big deal about the weather system, since it looks pretty much the same as Oblivion's in the screenshots. Just think back to when Oblivion was about to come out, and how Bethseda was hyping up the Radiant AI system, which we all know turned out to be nothing more than a mudcrab-conversation simulator. The reason why PC development is moving so slowly right now is because of consoles. They are currently the most profitable market, so game developers tailor their game's to console's capabilities, which in comparison to modern PC's, are abysmal. Unfortunately, the PC gamer demographic is a minority, most people are console gamers. Therefore there's a lot less room for profit when developing for the PC. Crysis 1 was an amazing example of a game that was made with PC's in mind, it not only supported cutting edge features only PC's could handle, it also was extremely optimized, with full support for multi-core CPU's, 64-bit OSes, multiple video card PC's (CrossfireX/SLI), etc. Most games have abysmal multi-core support, are not optimized for 64-bit systems, and scale poorly with Crossfire/SLI performance. As for the NPC voices thing your friend was talking about, yeah, it's bull. Even if it were conceivable to have a dynamically mixed voice system on todays computers, it would sound shitty. Just try mixing various sound clips from a recording of someones voice, the tone will sound all mixed up and awkward. What's more likely to be the next step is a TTS (text-to-speech) engine, but one that sounds realistic is pretty far away in the future. It's not so much a matter of performance, but trying to design software intricate enough to capture the various inflections, tonal patterns, accents, sentence flow, etc that people use when speaking.

That's one of the things I hate about Oblivion, since Oblivion barely uses multiple cores on processors, it's almost impossible to satisfy it CPU wise. The reccomended spec for vanilla Oblivion is a 3GHZ pentium 4. Todays CPU's are much more powerful, but only if the extra cores are used *pulls hair out in frustration*. That means I can either try overclocking to 4GHZ and hope Oblivion is satiated (which is difficult to do without producing a lot of heat and raising the voltage), or I can: http://img14.imageshack.us/img14/7293/heavyx.png

Do you have any suggestions for what I can do to get the best performance from Oblivion? Lots of people seem to get at least a steady 30FPS city/landscape (for some reason, cities have terrible FPS and landscape has great FPS for me (and that's with RAEVWD, QTP3, etc installed :P)). What hardware should I get to get that kind of performance?

It's fairly rare for a game to cause a complete system halt. It's probably either: 1. Overheating. Download and install the free (and trustworthy) program "Hardware Monitor" and make sure none of the temps are above 50C when outside the game (leave the computer running for a while before checking). 2. Driver issues. Make sure you have the latest (and correct) drivers for your video card, sound card, etc. 3. RAM issues. Download and install Memtest86+ to a USB memory stick (Select the "Download - Auto-installer for USB Key (Win 9x/2k/xp/7)" download). After you've installed it to the memory stick, reboot the computer with the memory stick still inserted. A blue screen should appear and begin checking the RAM. Leave it running for a few hours. If it reports even one error, then a RAM stick is likely damaged (re-run the check a few times if you want to make sure). Run the test again, with only one stick in, until you find which stick is causing the errors.

Disabling UAC does not suddenly make all accounts Admin accounts, it simply eliminates alerts relating to program functions. The account privilege system is separate from UAC and can function completely fine without it.