Weird framerate behavior

[Falconkaji]

I'm having some strange framerate problems with Oblivion despite the fact that I have a decent system that I just built. Whenever I'm looking at a decent amount of actors (6-7) my framerate drops from 50-60 all the way down to 21. Also, particle effects obliterate my framerate. My entire computer actually crashed in Kvatch because of all the fire. When it's not busy crashing, it'll run at less than 6 fps. Also, my system runs both The Last Remnant and Devil May Cry 4 with 8x AA, 16x anisotropic, and 1920x1200 resolution with all settings maxed at a perfect framerate. With that being said, how come oblivion, an older DX9 game, chokes with particle effects+actors at 1680x1050 with no AA? I'm running some mods like Real Light, Natural environments, and natural interiors, but if that had a huge effect on the framerate why is it taking such a huge jump only when i look at 6+ actors or extensive particle effects like burning kvatch? Just now, I used tdt in front of Weynon Priory where you have to take everybody to Cloud Ruler. When I was looking at the LOD with Jauffre and Martin on their horses behind me (and as such not on my screen) I had 60 FPS constant. I turn around and look at them (just 2 actors on horses) and all of a sudden I'm at 24 FPS.

 

No spyware/viruses or anything..literally just built this PC. Any help would be appreciated. :)

 

Oh, and just for the record.. my roommate runs a system with a Radeon HD 4670 DDR3 1GB (to my knowledge, not as good of a vid card as the one i have) and he had 0 problems in kvatch running the same exacts mods I do. His system has the same processor I do with 3GHZ rather than 2.7. He also has 2 more GB of ram than I do, but that shouldn't matter seeing as how this game doesn't approach full use of my ram. Somehow I doubt 300Mhz makes a 30-40 FPS difference.. so im thinking it has something to do with how i have my 3d options set up in the control panel or something. I don't know.

 

System specs

2.7GHZ AMD Athlon 64 Dual core

4GB DDR2 RAM

64 bit Windows Vista Ultimate

750W PSU

512MB GDDR3 GeForce 250 GTS

[Qwaxalot]

Your audio solution may be bogging down the CPU

 

To test, in the ...\Documents\mygames\oblivion\Oblivion.ini file locate:

 

bMusicEnabled=1

bSoundEnabled=1

 

And change both 1's to 0

 

If you get a big improvement either buy a sound card or try to reset the codecs

 

CODEC RESETS:

 

K-lite

 

Nightmare

[Falconkaji]

Hmm.. I use the Logitech Z Cinema speakers that connect by USB.. so a sound card wouldnt work unless it had a usb port on it (not sure if that exists, i have 0 knowledge about sound hardware). As for mods, I use the Enhanced Music Control OBSE plugin, and I also replaced all of the oblivion music files with pretty high quality mp3's (does that matter?). Trying that ini edit right now.

[Falconkaji]

Saw only a 1-2 fps gain with no sound..so looks like that isnt it. Still sitting at weynon, and its still the same thing - 50-60 FPS when looking at an area with 0-1 actors, 23-25 fps when looking at jauffre and martin on their horses.

 

Also, another thing I find strange is that while the burning fires of kvatch throw my fps down the crapper to 3-5 FPS, i experience no performance hit whatsoever when standing in front of an oblivion gate. In fact, I take more of a hit while looking at an actor holding a torch than I do with a gate. It seems like my system really hates fire for some reason?

[BossDweebe]

It is all strange. While none of what is below may help I'll mention it anyway.

Make no assumption that anything is OK. Likely what you gloss over is what is wrong. - Murphys Law will bite you.

 

You said the control panel setup could be it.

Have you tweaked the ini ? If so try rolling back to vanilla ini.

Your mate has the same mods exactly, and same load order ?

Is your HD is defraged ?

 

People often write and mention how other games work well. I have had the same happen.

I had some vid drivers a while back that just didn't go well with Oblivion. I still don't know why, but I

was crashing all the time. I kept thinking is was mods or memory - anything but the new drivers.

Finally I went back to an older series and the game worked much better. After a newer series came

out I gave them a try, and as one would hope, they were even better.

 

With the big variety of problems it would seem doubtful that it is because of mods, but there is still potential,

especially with some of the major overhaul mods, as they make changes to lots of cells.

The installation of any mod has to be precise.

 

Never underestimate Oblivion as an older DX9 game. It can bring very powerful

systems to their knees, especially with lots of high res mods and LOD replacers.

[bben46]

Check out the tweaks on this site. Maybe there will be something that will help.

 

http://www.tweakguides.com/

[darkjaffar]

Are you running any body mods? Any other mods that would change NPCs? Maybe something was installed incorrectly, or if it isn't one of the more well known and tested ones, perhaps the mod is flawed. You could also try disabling the mods to see if the problems exist with them off, or use a disable one at a time approach, starting with the newest and working towards the older ones.

[Falconkaji]

Disabled every mod I had and removed every folder in my data folder that replaced meshes, textures, or sounds in the game. This all resulted in a fps gain of 3-4 FPS, which is to be expected from playing modless and probably isn't the source of the problem. Right now I just reinstalled an older version of my motherboard chipset drivers. I attempted to reinstall older graphics drivers but my vendor installation CD literally wouldn't let me install older ones (I use an XFX GTS 250 and the CD forcefully directed me to the site, which only lets me install the newest drivers, 185.85). Regardless, im installing those drivers since they're from my vendor's site.

 

Assuming this doesn't work, I'm trying to focus on the difference between my roommate's system and mine. He has a processor that's 300mhz better than mine - thats just about the only thing I can think of. We both use the same speakers and even the same motherboard. I have a much bigger PSU than him - he only uses a 450 watt which is fine for his Radeon HD 4670.

 

There's only two things I can blame at this point. I'm running Norton Antivirus - could that be doing anything? Also, his Radeon 4670, while obviously a slower card than the GTS 250, is a 1GB card whereas mine is a 512MB card. I assumed that Oblivion wasn't a game that benefits from extra memory beyond 512. Is it the memory difference between our two cards that gives him much better performance in areas like Kvatch?

 

Also, what REALLY boggles my mind is that since I used the default .ini file in this testing, my resolution defaulted to 640x480 and all of the video settings went down to medium (med texture sizes, no blood, low detail, low shadows, etc). I literally saw the SAME fps average (5-10 in Kvatch, 23-29 when looking at busy actors, 50-60 when looking at no actors) that I saw when playing 1920x1200 with all settings maxed. How is this even possible?

[Falconkaji]

update: early drivers help none.

[BossDweebe]

It's nothing to do with your systems specs.

Plenty of people run much slower systems than yours.

I have the game on an old Athlon 2700 /nVidia 7600Gt / 2G DDR. Settings are down, but it runs OK.

I also have it on a 180 Opteron @ 2.4/ 8800GT/ 2G DDR and it only has some stuttering when riding a horse

with everything turned up and HDR.

 

You did a clean of the mods but didn't mention LOD replacers. Some of the Hi res ones can really do a job

on system performance.

 

Turn the Norton AV off and see. Can't hurt if offline. If not then....

Back to the drivers for a moment. The earlier don't help. OK..

The disc that come with the MB and Graphics card are alway out of date.

So try the newest for both. The MB should always have the newest drivers and BIOS.

The Tweak Guides that bben pointed to has some good notes on correct installation of drivers and

system optimization.

 

Also set up your page file correctly. That is to say, don't let windows do it.

Set it yourself to both min and max that is 1.5 X the amount of RAM you are running.

This keeps the page file from getting spread all over your HD. A lot of green lines instead of a single

block, on your windows defrag tool is a sign of this. This may or may not help, but is good practice.

The page file is still helpful for quick RAM operation.