FPS Mystery

[Charlinho]

Playing the 100 % identical game on a Pentium 4 XP SP3 4GB ram and a Quad Core Windows 7 64 Professional 8 GB ram the XP wins the race.

The graphics Card on the Win7 comp is twice as fast as the XP. Games like Crysis 3 and Anno 2070 run with at least 30+ Frames with maxed out settings.

That info is just to set aside any hardware issues.

 

My Oblivion is heavily modded, no doubt, but if it weren't for the CS and mods I would have stopped caring 4 years ago as is the case with 99% of the other games which I play, enjoy and then forget about.

 

After endless hours of trying out every trick in the book, from anti-stutter mods, Wrye bashing, OBMM-ing, TES 4 cleaning and merging, you name it, bottom line,

the same problems persist.

 

Here's the thing that bugs me most: when I'm in an interior cell with 20+ other npcs the framerate drops to around 10 or less fps. If I turn away from them and stare at the wall it goes up to 30. Their AI converstation also then kicks in smoothly. The moment I turn around to face the crowd FPS drops again , sound gets cut etc. My conclusion is that it's got to be a cpu processing issue not graphics. When I'm out in the open, solo, with hi-rez landscape there's no probs at all, smooth sailing. My best guess is that it's got to do with simultaneous, multiple NPC ai processing which is maxing out the cpu - on the other hand why should it make a difference if I'm facing them or not?

 

My questions are: has anyone experienced the same syptoms as mine and did they manage to solve them?

will sheer computing power solve the issue or has the game engine simply reached it's limits?

 

XP faster than Win 7 for Oblivion -best info I got so far is that DX 9 is faster than DX10 which is what Oblivion supposedly runs with on a DX 11 computer

[Werne]

Let's start from the basics... what are your hardware specs? And which graphics driver are you using? Oblivion tends to dislike certain graphics drivers (like AMD's 13.4 and 13.9) so you can try with an older driver.

 

By the way, just to check if the problem is what I think it is, try setting bUseFaceGenHeads to 0 and run the game. Don't be alarmed if all the NPCs suddenly lose their heads, that's the intention. If the performance still drops the same way even with that setting at 0, then you can rule out one issue, which is good. But if the performance becomes great after chopping their heads off, then you're screwed.

[Charlinho]

Thanks for the reply - much appreciated

 

XP PC is a Pentium D Dual Core 3.4 Ghz 4 Gb ram - Nvidia 8800 GT graphics card

Win 7 PC is a Q9550 Core 2 Quad 8GB ram - ATI 5970 graphics card using the 13.9 driver

 

I'm new to ATI and reverting back to an older driver turned out to be a real nightmare, unlike Nvidia.

Uninstalling the new driver completely and re-installing and older one didn't work plus the AMD site provides no infos on how to go about that. Googling was also useless.

So I gave up on that.

 

turning off bUseFaceGenHeads:

 

with XP framerates improved from 3 Fps to 5 Fps facing the Npcs and goes up to 25 facing a wall - with or without the feature disabled

with Win 7 the game crashes after about 3-5 seconds - facing a wall framerates are at 45. Activating or de-activating cross-fire makes no difference.

 

I have the same fps problem in the presence of many NPCs with Fallout 3, in this specific case when in My RTS (Real-Time-Settler) settlement.

The similarity between the two games is that in both cases the 15-40 Npcs are in Idle mode which means that their ai's kick in more or less randomly i.e. wander, eat, start conversation etc.

What I did expect was that there would at least be a significant improvement on the Win7 PC, but there's virtually no improvement, maybe even worse with Fallout.

 

That's where I'm beginning to think that a stronger computer, no matter how powerful, won't make any difference either, that the game engines have reached their limits. I'm

hoping here that someone proves me wrong and has stretched his/her games a lot further without any hitches.