Poor Oblivion performance caused by... heads?

[MasterAub]

Another one silly question. Have you run a benchmark on your videocard to make sure it's running to its full capability?

Basically have you run an assessment of your videocard. My little finger is telling me that's where your problem comes from.

Edited July 31, 2013 by MasterAub

[roquefort]

Some Catalyst drivers don't like Oblivion much, I've found. Frame skipping has been a problem for me in the past with updated ATI drivers. Have you tried an earlier version, or possibly an Omega Drivers version?

[Werne]

@MasterAub Yup, I've ran benchmarks while I was overclocking it, to measure performance and to see will it work right (aka, will the vertex blow up all over the place). I used Unigine Heaven benchmark for comparing performance increase, it reported 10.7 FPS average, which is pretty good compared to stock clocks performance (5.3 FPS average).

 

Also, Oblivion does seem to be putting much more strain on my GPU than CPU, I thought the load would be more distributed like it is in most other games I play. It would seem that it uses 94% GPU max (sometimes drops as low as 28%, for a reason unknown to me) while FO3/NV/Skyrim use 100% nearly constantly and need more. I have a script set up that measures CPU and GPU load for a single process, and the highest measured CPU load for Oblivion.exe is the following:

 PID   TID   PSR %CPU
10912 10912   0  60.3
10912 10934   1  23.5

System monitor reports a 37% average CPU load (combined average for both cores), which is surprising, seeing as how the other games I have use up from 55-75%, ME3 has an average CPU load of 83%. Not to mention that Oblivion uses my CPU poorly, Core 0 is getting used a lot while the other is just chillin', I could try to make a script that would force it to use both cores equally but I'm not so sure I'd get anything by that. As for GPU load, the max value was:

GPU load :    94%

That's about right, since the poor thing is pretty weak even when overclocked with it's DDR2 VRAM and 600/400 clocks. It was a low-end GPU back in the day, now it's practically useless for most games.

 

Highest temps and fan speed measured while running Oblivion are:

GPU Temperature - 71.50 C
CPU FAN Speed:   2073 RPM
CPU Temperature:  +41.0°C
Core 0:       +51.0°C
Core 1:       +49.0°C

I can't tell what exactly is at fault here, nothing gets used 100%, nothing even heats up much, so I can't point a finger and say "that's it". But I'm starting to suspect the graphics card, my CPU should mop the floor with Oblivion while the card is an old museum exhibit that barely runs FO3 (has less trouble with FONV though). Card appears to be the weakest link.

 

 

 

@roqefort Huh, I didn't know that. I can go back all the way to Catalyst 12.2, though getting an older driver could affect performance of my other games. Then again, it's worth a shot, otherwise I bought Oblivion for nothing and I really like the game. As for Omega drivers, there are none for Linux, though I can make my own driver tweaks using xorg.conf.

 

I did use Omega drivers on WinXP and Win7 but I must say, I didn't see any performance increase with them, mostly due to the fact that I was tweaking the original ATI driver much in the same way as Omega did.

Edited July 31, 2013 by Werne