Poor Oblivion performance caused by... heads?

[Werne]

I can do anything and Oblivion runs at cca 35 FPS, but as soon as an NPC appears, my framerate drops down to 25 FPS, sometimes even under 20 FPS (and that's only one NPC). So I tried tweaking everything I could think of, performance was still poor whenever an NPC pops up.

 

Then the phone rand and I went to pick it up, the game was left on, I didn't pause at all. As I was looking at the screen, I noticed that the framerate is smooth, even though there's a bunch of NPCs on the screen. Tried moving the mouse around, got down to 7 FPS.

 

Moved the mouse around till only their bodies were showing, 29 FPS. Raised it up a bit so their heads pop into screen, 7 FPS. Started a new game, Blades came with the king, 27 FPS as I stare at their bodies, 12 FPS when their heads show up. :blink:

 

That was 3 years ago, I installed Oblivion for the first time since then and I'm having the same problem right now, the frame-killer heads strike again. :mad: Vanilla Oblivion, didn't get any mods yet, not even OBSE I thought I should solve the issue of it being unplayable first.

 

Now I'm wondering, how can heads cause such a framerate drop? They aren't too pretty looking, I can't imagine them having a large poly-count, and facial animations shouldn't be this demanding either. I mean, Fallout 3, Fallout NV and Skyrim work perfectly, and at 28-35 FPS, so why is Oblivion doing this? Ugh. :wallbash:

 

I've been thinking, and there are a few things I can try (I can rule out ini tweaks, already done that). I can rip out the graphics card and switch to on-board Intel chipset, maybe the card is messing with me (wouldn't surprise me). Or I can try setting CPU/graphics clocks to factory settings, maybe it doesn't like overclocking. I just don't get it at all, my machine should run it on at least very low at a relatively stable framerate, but nooo. :rolleyes:

 

Anyway, here are my system specs, maybe I'm missing something obvious:

 

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 2.20GHz (overclocked, 3.0GHz core speed, 275MHz FSB)

Motherboard: ASUS P5KPL-AM IN/ROEM/SI

RAM: 2GB DDR2

Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 4350 1GB (overclocked, 715/555 clocks)

Graphics driver: ATI Catalyst Legacy 13.1

Operating System: Debian GNU/Linux 7.1 "Wheezy" - i686

 

Oh yeah, it has nothing to do with Linux, I quit Oblivion 3 years ago after a month of struggling with it cause it failed to work properly on Windows XP, had same problem as I have right now, same PC too, only the OS changed. Didn't have an internet connection at the time though so I couldn't ask for help, now I can.

 

So, now I'm asking, why? Why this? Why me? Why does stuff like this always have to happen to me? My PC, why hast thou forsaken me? :facepalm:

[Hickory]

You are using old save games, yes? This sounds like the animation ABomb bloat issue. You can use Wrye Bash to fix your save game, or the Animation Fixer.

[bben46]

1. Oblivion is a Windows game. It was designed to work with windows and expects to be run with windows. - Using any other OS is asking for problems.

2. 2G ram. This is marginal

3. Background programs - the phone rang? was this by any chance a VOIP phone through your computer? these do use system resources such as ram and CPU clock cycles. And EVERY other background program not only uses ram, but steals clock cycles from the game as well. Even when you think they are not doing anything.

 

BTW, I ran Oblivion on a 32 bit windows XP with 2G ram for a while. It did bog down, but not as much as what you describe. Upping the ram to 3G made a major difference. Then going to 4G (still 32 bit) not so much improvement. Going to Win7x64 (still 4G) made an improvement, but not as big as difference as between 2 and 3 G. on the 32 bit XP.

[Werne]

@Hickory Nah, new game, all is well until the Blades and the king come, then all goes to hell. And only their heads make the game lag, I can look anywhere else and it goes over 30 FPS. I'll still run the Animation Fixer and see if it does anything.

 

 

 

 

@bben

1. True, while Wine is quite efficient, it can't work as well as Windows, I won't argue with that. I did get all my games to run in it though, so I can't say it's too bad.

 

2. Oblivion doesn't use more than 800MB RAM for me, everything else, including Xorg, uses 127MB total. I can also offload most of the unused processes (like taskbar and file manager) into Swap in order to free up RAM.

 

3. Nah, it's a cordless Panasonic phone, VOIP phones cannot be used in my country. And I also tried switching all processes to Core 1 while keeping oblivion on Core 0 through a script, though that didn't work as expected, I think Linux handles that better than me.

 

For me it was the same thing on XP as I have now, excellent framerate until I look an NPC in the face, then it goes down significantly, the more NPCs are on the screen, the worse it gets. It's almost identical to this thread on tomshardware, same thing, works flawlessly until there are NPCs around, but for me the problem is their face only, not the whole NPC.

 

 

 

 

And everything I tried so far was in vain. I've been monitoring and logging CPU and graphics card utilization while running Oblivion and I found, well, nothing. By nothing, I mean exactly that, everything is as it should be, no values are out of the ordinary, except that the game runs terribly. I think I can narrow this down to the CPU, since it performs the same irrelevant of graphical settings (except when I lower the resolution, that makes it work worse), but I still don't get why does it happen.

Aside from game running awful, it's all good, CPU peaks at 63%, runs at 51% average while GPU peaks at 57% and runs at 46% average. According to that, they should both be able to handle Oblivion quite well, but they don't. I don't know why the CPU isn't utilized 100% if the game needs it, I gotta look into that, maybe switch process priority or something. I'll also try changing the threading settings in Oblivion.ini next and see if that does anything.

I did try something but that didn't work as expected, didn't work too well at all actually. Since Oblivion was designed to work on a single-core 3.0GHz Intel Pentium 4, I switched Oblivion from using both cores to using Core 0 only, while all other processes on my PC were running on Core 1. I still got nowhere (I did get worse performance though) but at least I learned a bit more about scripting.

And after all the looking around, tweaking settings and examining logs, I'm back to square one. :sad:

EDIT: Progress, it's definitely the heads. I have the game saved right as the king comes in with the Blades, usually the framerate when they come to the cell is 8 FPS. I set bUseFaceGenHeads=1 to 0 in Oblivion.ini, everyone was headless with floating helmets but the game ran at stable 47 FPS. Now the question is, why heads specifically? Nothing else in Oblivion can drop the framerate on my PC below 30 FPS except for heads.

Edited July 29, 2013 by Werne

[Striker879]

Do you have 'self shadows' turned on in the video settings menu?

[Werne]

@Striker879 No, Shadows, Bloom, HDR, anti-aliasing and Anisotropic filtering are the first thing I disable, my PC can't take any of it in FO3, NV and Skyrim (Morowind can work fine with 16x anisotropy, AA is still out of the question) so I disable it as soon as I run the launcher for the first time.

[Striker879]

Have you tried the ini settings for actors outlined in Koroush Ghazi's Oblivion Tweak Guide page 10? I doubt that those settings alone will solve the problem but I can't think of anything else to suggest.

[Werne]

Yup, tweaked all of that, still nothing, so far the only thing that works is disabling heads completely. :sad: Even though heads in Oblivion might not be the best looking, I still prefer having them over chopping them off.

[MasterAub]

I have a silly question...Do you have the latest videocard drivers installed?

[Werne]

Yeah, ATI Catalyst 13.1.