Lots of mods cause extra stuttering?

[Darkstorne]

I've heard that having a lot of mods installed, particularly mods that add custom weapons and armour to the game, cause the game to stutter more often. Is this true?

 

And if it is true, do they only cause stuttering when they are active? Or simply through adding extra meshes and textures to the data folder, meaning they would cause extra stuttering even when they aren't active?

 

The reason I ask is that I have a lot of mods installed in my game. A quick count of the number of files possible to activate through OBMM totals at 139 excluding the main Oblivion file and official expansions. Most of these are either small mods like 'No More Annoying Messages' or separate parts of the same mod. Beautiful Women and Handsome Gents for example have several different files to activate between them, and Francesco's is also broken down into several files.

 

Even so, that's a lot of mods, and I usually have different ones activated depending on which character i'm playing, particularly when it comes down to armour and weapons. If this likely contributes to a lot of stuttering though, then I'd like to shorten that list down and start using only a handful of essential mods.

 

Any feedback on the impact of mods on performance would be greatly appreciated! I don't want to spend hours cleaning everything up, or doing a re-install of the game, for little to no benefit!

 

Thanks for reading!

 

-Darkstorne-

[dezdimona]

since you didn't list your mods or the load order,y0ur question is open ended and impossible to answer.Though weapon and armor mods do not cause stuttering. try this load order guide, and please if you use boss click mods do's and don'ts in my siggy!

 

 

General Load-Order Guidelines

Here are the guidelines that I adhere to, personally.

 

~ Unofficial Oblivon Patch should always be first on the list. The fixes are great, but most aren't essential, so if a mod overwrites them its not a big deal, and the fixes have the potential for screwing up other mods if loaded later.

 

~ Offical Content (DLC's) should be loaded last, until you complete all quests associated with them (that includes buying all furniture for the houses and whatnot). Once they're complete, they can be safely moved up in the list. This is especially important for Knights of the Nine, which will have some fairly major problems unless loaded last (unless you get the UOP for KotN)

 

~ Major overhaul mods (OOO, Frans, MMM) should be loaded near the end. That gives you the most complete experience with any of those particular mods. It also lets you carefully choose which other mods to load afterwards... only move mods that you know will conflict and that you want the changes from. For example, I have Improved Soul Gems below OOO because I know that OOO changes the icons of some of the SG's, and ISG needs to be below to show through.

 

Some people will recommend putting larger mods first, but personally I disagree. There are a number of mods out there that make minor tweaks, and loading after a large mod will end up completely overwriting a chunk from one of the bigger mods because of the way conflicts work in Oblivion (even one minor change will take precedence over the entire record... for example, simply tweaking the speed of a weapon can cause every stat of that weapon to be retained to vanilla levels if loaded later).

 

So basically, it stacks up like this...

 

Oblivion.esm

Unofficial Oblivion Patch

<Minor Mods / DLC's (Post-Completion)>

<Major Overhaul Mod/Mods>

<Mods that specifically conflict with overhauls and need to take precedence>

<DLC's (Pre-Completion)>

Note: If using Mayu's Overhaul Mod. I recommend loading it after OOO or MMM

 

 

Expanded Load-Order Guidelines

by dev_akm

 

I would extend this to include:

 

Oblivion.esm

Unofficial Oblivion Patch

<Weather/Environment/Sound Mods>

<Minor Mods/New Items/Houses/DLC's (Post-Completion)>

<Major Overhaul Mods>

<Mods that specifically conflict with overhauls and need to take precedence>

<DLC's (Pre-Completion)>

<Quests>

<Compatibility Patches/UOMP/Merged Leveled Lists>

 

And a special-case warning for Knights.esp (Knights of the Nine) -- you may not be able to move it earlier than some other mods (some people have had problems after moving it before OOO, for example).

 

That's basically the structure I use and I have 140+ mods working well together.

 

Another way of describing this (posted by DMan77):

....

Oblivion

unoffical patch

Deeper realism mods that add sights and sounds

added content like weapons/items

gameplay changes, like 'must eat and sleep'

The OOO type

the 'new begining' type mod..

[Vagrant0]

since you didn't list your mods or the load order,y0ur question is open ended and impossible to answer.Though weapon and armor mods do not cause stuttering.

Just a bit of needed clarification here. The mods themselves do not cause stuttering, provided the following cases are not present;

 

The mod also adds several NPCs to towns which are wearing those items.

 

The mod adds a full 4 quad+ worldspace as part of a .esp, when it just uses a handful of those cells for some sort of island. .esp mods are stored in ram, and very large .esp mods can decrease the amount of available RAM, and cause stuttering.

 

The mod makes use of many scripts which are constantly running due to being attached to a quest or an ability on the player, or have gamemode/menumode based scripts which are attached to equipment, and is currently in the player's inventory.

 

Both these cases are rare, but do exist in some mods. The extent of stuttering that they may cause however is limited to the severity that these things are being done, your own system, and what other mods you also have present.

 

But, you must also remember that anything resource based is not just the mod, but also the resource. Although the mod itself may not contain any of those cases mentioned above, the resources which are part of the mod can still cause some stuttering in lower-end systems. Typically, resources which have the following have this potential;

 

Weapons contain more than 2000 tris, armor/clothing contains more than 20000 tris (for whole suit, including body parts).

 

Items are present on many different actors loaded within common scenes (like having 4-5 companions in) and the items used are different and are near the tri limits mentioned above.

 

Textures for weapons and armors are larger than 2048x2048, and multiple textures are used per piece.

 

Weapon contains particle nodes which are configured poorly, or which uses extremely large textures.

 

Dropped weapon or armor meshes have collisions which are not configured properly, or which are overly complex.

 

Again, it isn't common, but can be found with some weapon mods. However, these things will only have any impact if the weapon or armor happens to be currently loaded by the game. If you are experiencing stuttering, your best bet is to try and figure out what circumstances the stuttering is present, and try to find something in common.

 

 

On a side note, it is usually a bad idea to remove mods once they have become active within a save game. Doing so can lead to memory errors which can add up over time and create many problems.

[nosisab]

just adding to Vagrant post than even changing load order of some massive mods (like overhauls) may turn the savegame unplayable (the common issue is the game stalling at the savegame load).

[Darkstorne]

Thanks for the feedback guys, very useful.

 

I'm running Oblivion on a powerful system so judging by your information the mods probably aren't causing any issues. Some of the mods are large (Elsweyr Anequina) and Francesco's combined with Tamriel Travellers does add a lot of new NPCs wearing new armour and weapons, but the additional RAM usage probably isn't too bad if these mods only tend to affect less powerful systems.

 

My load order is already by-and-large correct, and hearing that Dezdimona is running even more mods than me is good to hear. I'm not crazy. Or at least, i'm not the only crazy one =P

 

Many thanks for your replies! I guess stuttering will never be completely eliminated after all, so i'm now happy and content!

 

-Darkstorne-