FPS Questions related to BC Waterfront and RAEVWD

[geraintwd]

Thanks Eric, not sure why I couldn't find that before.

[MadWizard25]

Thanks, I'll try different settings in OSR and see if that helps. Might not bother with PyFFI then, if the FPS gain is negligible. I'm running FCOM as well, but there is no way I'm playing without it, just as there is no way I'm using the BC Waterfront FPS patch, it removes far too much eye candy. I'm not too bothered about trying to gain more FPS by turning off things like AA, my GTX680 gives me good framerates in Skyrim while running a full set of high res texture packs and ENB in 2560x1440 with full AA, AF, AO, FXAA and any other acronyms you can think of, so it's not as if Oblivion is going to tax it unduly.

 

I think its hard to compare Skyrim and Oblivion this way. Oblivion just isnt optimized for modern CPUs, GPUs, and RAM. You could have a gtx titan and still have issues. I too own Skyrim and with just eye candy mods activated it looks amazing and is stable. Yet Oblivion doesn't look as good and isnt as stable.

 

Streamsave does not overwrite saves like the vanilla autosaver does. When it makes a new save, it deletes the oldest one. 100% safe, and highly recommended.

 

The problem with streamsave is it still autosaves for you. Any autosave, even from mods is playing with fire. Streamsave may be better than vanilla, but manual non-overwrite saves are still the way to go. But then again im risk averse :)

[Germandeathkittiez]

Thanks for the advice madwizard, I've definitely got an FPS boost now, using OSR. Wonder why I ever stopped using it. xD Stopping NPC's wandering definitely helped too, but I still get extremely low FPS in that slum area along the shoreline. A lot of guards just stand around there because of where I'm at in the Thieves Guild, could be why. The good news though is that the game is extremely stable after some OSR tweaking. Now I no longer need to use any of Streamline's FPS features, so this is a huge improvement, even though the game still gets pretty stuttery just running around loading LOD and cities.

[MadWizard25]

No problem Mr. Ninja, glad I could help :)

 

I too am still plagued by stutters. And ive spent a long time trying to eliminate them, without success. I can live with it though, It only happens when new cells are being loaded in heavily modded areas (LOD as you said), and once its loaded the stutters are gone. Interiors are stutter free. I have a feeling that having a good CPU might help reduce this, since the game is so CPU dependent. A Haswell at 4.5GHz would be interesting to test on.

[geraintwd]

No problem Mr. Ninja, glad I could help :smile:

 

I too am still plagued by stutters. And ive spent a long time trying to eliminate them, without success. I can live with it though, It only happens when new cells are being loaded in heavily modded areas (LOD as you said), and once its loaded the stutters are gone. Interiors are stutter free. I have a feeling that having a good CPU might help reduce this, since the game is so CPU dependent. A Haswell at 4.5GHz would be interesting to test on.

 

I don't have a Haswell, but I have a 3770K at 4.5GHz and trust me, I still get low FPS at the waterfront, not much stuttering elsewhere mind, but with FCOM, Better Cities and UL I am still trying to nail down the cause of frequent CTDs, especially around the Imperial Isle.

[MadWizard25]

I don't have a Haswell, but I have a 3770K at 4.5GHz and trust me, I still get low FPS at the waterfront, not much stuttering elsewhere mind, but with FCOM, Better Cities and UL I am still trying to nail down the cause of frequent CTDs, especially around the Imperial Isle.

 

Ah well, i assumed clock speed would help the most. I guess its just the game engine then. I run at 3.2GHz with an i5 2400. Since you dont stutter, and I do, perhaps your higher clock speed helps with that.

 

I have however managed to eliminate frequent CTDs with FCOM UL BC and Really AEVWD. I only get the odd interior-exterior transition crash. I was getting the same crashes as you; frequent around Imperial Isle as well as other exterior areas.

 

One source of crash was me forgetting to re-run the UL Compatibility Patches wizard (i use Wrye Bash) when adding/ removing mods.

 

I assume your running OSR, which is what helped me the most. I used iHeap 1024 and IHeapAlgorithm 6. Worked wonders.

 

I also was getting land tears, which I read somewhere could cause exterior CTDs. I used TES4LODGen + Land Magic + TES4LL to fix those.

 

I also use a mostly default oblivion.ini. No core/ threading/ iPreload/ uGrids tweaks. Tried a lot of tweaks and most did nothing and some were causes of CTDs.

 

Other than that, I get low IC waterfront fps, no matter what ive done (FPS patch+limit AI in BC as well as Bashed Patch), but at least it doesnt crash.

 

Hope this helps.

Edited December 9, 2013 by MadWizard25

[geraintwd]

Thanks MadWizard. I've still not got quite as far as installing RAEVWD, I've had to abandon the idea of setting ugridstoload any higher than default - it causes frequent CTDs, even at 7, as well as other issues (e.g. hopping, strange NPC behaviour and a massive land tear at Fanacasecul).

 

EDIT: Ok, I have installed RAEVWD and it looks great, but I am getting strange CTDs in specific places. For example, at the IC end of the bridge that connects to Weye (near the stables) and climbing the hill just past Fort Nikel (on the road towards Chorrol). So far I have tested both places twice and both crashed each time in exactly the same spot. However, I can fast travel to Cheydinhal and run to Bruma without any issues, in fact I went 25 mins without a CTD and then quit the game normally.

 

Obviously I need to do some more testing and find out if there are any other hotspots for CTDs, but in the meantime it looks mostly stable. Framerates are in the 20s for most of the time, but gameplay is reasonably smooth, even in combat. I'm using Streampurge at the fastest setting and OSR with heapmode 1 and heapsize 1024 (interestingly, If I set it to 2048, the game crashes on startup). Btw, I think I saw someone mention they were using heapmode 6, but there is no 6. The SR log file gives an error to this effect if I try it.

 

I will post my load order and any other info I can get from Bash when I get time and I'll clean my mods in TES4EDIT as well, but in the meantime if anyone can think of what might be causing these very specific CTDs, please reply below. I have not had these occur until I installed RAEVWD.

[MadWizard25]

Mmmm yes, I was getting the same crashes just before weye after the IC bridge.

 

Regarding OSR, I was referring to iHeapAlgorithm set at 6. I cant seem to find this iHeapmode setting in OSR? Which OSR are you using? I recommend the Tripple_WIP_4-1-26 version.

 

You need to make sure that heap managment is turned on in the OSR ini with;

 

bReplaceHeap = 1

 

which is under the Master section.

 

Heap management depends on iHeapAlgorithm and iHeapSize, these are my settings (6 and 1024 respectively)

 

Heap = {
_comment = Heap replacement can produce MAJOR improvements in performance on Oblivion at a significant cost in stability
_comment = It crashes instantly on Fallout3, and would only produce a small performance improvement there anyway
_comment = It is not supported at all on Fallout: New Vegas at this time
_comment = Algorithms: 1=FastMM4, 2=Microsoft (slow on XP), 3=SimpleHeap1, 4=TBBMalloc, 5=ThreadHeap2, 6=ThreadHeap3, 8=tcmalloc
_comment = Algorithms numbers 1, 4, and 8 require external DLL files in the Data/OBSE/Plugins/ComponentDLLs folder
iHeapAlgorithm = 6
bEnableProfiling = 0
iHeapSize = 1024
bEnableMessages = 0
iGenericFreeDelay = 0
bZeroAllocations = 0
}

 

In my experience, only iHeapAlgorithm 5 and 6 are stable. And yeah, anything over 1024 iHeapSize is very CTD prone, ive never seen anything higher than that :) Also you can play around with this value. Some people report better stabilty with settings somewhere between 512 and 1024. 768 is a good one to try.

 

Streampurge setting should also not be extreme high or low; 4 is the best setting for stability.

 

uGrids 7 will be very very difficult to get working on a heavily modded setup. It screws with physics and pathing as well, so even if you get it stable, the bugs that appear make it not worth it.

 

Also remember to drop ugriddistantcount to somewhere between 15 to 20 if useing RAEVWD, or use streamsight with correct fog values.

 

Hope this helps!

[geraintwd]

Hmm, thought I was using the latest OSR, have to check when I'm next on my pc. Will also experiment some more with Streampurge setting. Thanks for the tips about heapsize and ugridsdistant. I have already abandoned any ideas of increasing ugrids above default, but with new landscape lod textures and raevwd, I don't really need to.

[Germandeathkittiez]

Back to the topic of Streamline, I think I learned my lesson with those streamsaves. I noticed the saves would start crashing more and more when they tried to save and when loading - both for Streamsaves and Manual Saves. I had to go back to saves that were stable, losing a lot of hours of dungeon-delving. So yeah, I do not recommend streamsaving either. Of course, it could have been one of my many other mods causing this problem... But the pattern seems like streamsave because this started happening after I told SL to do streamsaves outdoors (otherwise it barely ever happens), and I got progressively more crashes until my saves were virtually destroyed.

 

I tried ENBoost, didn't seem to get much of a performance boost, except maybe in the wilderness in some places. It's still just as laggy as ever in cities, though. Any tips on what ini settings to use? I tried to shut all the graphics stuff off but I didn't understand some of it. I'm either going to keep tweaking and searching for more ways of boosting FPS, or I might have to tearfully give up FCOM and maybe just use OOO, 'till I get a better PC. At least it's stable enough that I can run around for an hour or so with no crash. Thanks for all the advice.