FPS Comparison

[Jenrai]

Agree with the new graphics card statements. But focus on video memory. 256 is way too low, and with how poor your FPS is with pretty much everything you can do giving little to no benefit, I would guess yours is dying anyway. Obviously no way to be sure of that without testing it for myself but that sounds really, really low.

 

MSI make some great budget cards that use the Nvidia chipsets, maybe slightly older models, but you can pick up a 1gb MSI 9500 Nvidia for half the price of the newer Nvidia cards.

 

In all honesty, my base system is somewhat better without the taking the cards into consideration anyways, but Oblivion doesn't even know what multi-core processors are, let alone how to utilize them properly, and only recognises up to 2gb of ram anyways.

Having more helps because the background stuff doesn't then eat into the 2gb that the game is using.

 

I'd also look at what you have running in the background. Even on the higher end computers, too much clutter will slow pretty much everything down. Things like device programs you don't neccesarily always use (mobile phone PC programs, sat nav programs, mobile internet connection programs, ITunes & torrent hosts are all belters for this) but that start on the systems start up can be disabled. Also, and this sounds daft, but believe me, it helps - disable your internet connection whilst you're not using it.

 

Last but not least, what AV do you use? Several of them are real process gluttons. I mean real bad. Like a Cadilliac drinks fuel, these things will gobble up your system resources like nobody's business. Norton is an absolute cow for it. And is bloody useless to boot. If yours is bad, look at getting something like PC Tools Spyware Doctor with Antivirus: Updates regularly, has both spyware and AV defense, and whilst it breaks it down into several smaller processes, instead of one huge one like some, so it looks worse on your process list, this in fact helps your computer maintain its resources as several smaller ones are easier to run than one big one.

 

Jenrai

[ptbptb]

I would guess yours is dying anyway.

It had better not be - I only bought it a month ago.

[Jenrai]

It had better not be - I only bought it a month ago.

 

Then I would almost certainly say your drain isn't so much the graphics card. I mean, the memory, ideally should be bigger, but I know not everyone has money to spend on the latest all singing all dancing ones... an Nvidia 256 should still put out more FPS than yours is doing, especially at low detail/res and with all those performance boosters.

Back up your .ini to somewhere and delete it, let the game make you a new one. That might buy you some back but I doubt its the root cause of that much of a frame-rate loss.

Do you have Mass Effect? Thats a decent benchmarking game that doesn't knock the living daylights out of a CPU or require the worlds fastest video card. If so, how does it run/look?

 

Jen

[ptbptb]

Killing Norton bought me about 3 to 3.5 FPS, disconnecting the Internet made no appreciable difference. I already use Game Booster which turns off most non-essential background processes.

[Jenrai]

Killing Norton bought me about 3 to 3.5 FPS, disconnecting the Internet made no appreciable difference. I already use Game Booster which turns off most non-essential background processes.

 

I dunno what game booster is, tbh, I've always preffered doing it by hand. Things like cftmon (useless programming for voice recognition commands that starts when windows does- why? not a clue) can be safely killed, even though it is part of windows. I try to keep my active processes list below 20 if I'm gaming/watching movies, though that is a very, very skeletal set up, and I know my system can handle more but I like to have it running at top quality without negatively impacting performance.

Is your comp set to apply its own virtual memory? You have 4gb of ram so you should have plenty of VM, but sometimes it just decides to use an imaginary user defined number that is so small it kills performance - I've seen this a couple of times and think it might be a hangover from spyware/viral infection. Never seen it on my system but I have on others that I've been fixing.

Another silly one just occured to me - do you use any RAM monitoring programs? There are some out there that whilst they do free up RAM, munch through processing resources so they actually negatively impact performance instead of boosting it.

 

Jen

[ptbptb]

I try to keep my active processes list below 20 if I'm gaming/watching movies

 

Is that with 'show processes from all users' selected? About half the ones on my list are 'svchost.exe', which shouldn't be messed with.

 

I dunno what game booster is

This: Game Booster.

It's free, and also can defrag your game directory. It does shut down a lot of stuff safely, but I can't say that it improved the FPS noticably.

[Jenrai]

I try to keep my active processes list below 20 if I'm gaming/watching movies

 

Is that with 'show processes from all users' selected? About half the ones on my list are 'svchost.exe', which shouldn't be messed with.

 

 

I have that... about 4 times, iirc... And no, I don't touch it. I might be being generous saying 20, but basically, having spent many a long and arduous hour killing things in my computers over the years just to see what it actually does, I now use the "run -> msconfig" command prompt to kill almost everything once my computer has started up for the first time. Has 2 very noticable effects:

 

1- It starts up like a damn whippet. turn it on, turn around to look for something, glance up and its there, impatiently tapping its virtual foot waiting for a password so it can carry on.

2- Finding problems when they occur (when - not if. This is windows afterall) tends to be sooooo much easier.

 

If you're only firing it up for gaming purposes a lot of things can be disabled. Java, for example. It don't drink much unless its actually doing something, resources wise, but every little helps, right?

Update schedulers are another one. As long as you remember to run them every once in a while, theres no harm in killing those. Adobe programs - everything from reader to paintshop pro) tend to start automatically. Apple programs do. Quicktime. Always always always seems to find a way to force itself to start up though somehow that one.

Soundmanagers. Absolutely tosh. They do nothing unless you actually want to change something anyways so launch em by hand if you do. 3rd party media players - one or two of these start up automatically and run in the background. Personally I just go for winamp anyways, which doesnt autostart, but hey thats not always to everyones tastes. Windows Indexing. Lord WHY? Why oh why oh why did they put an indexing system (only in certain versions, admittedly) of windows so it can keep track of what is being put where and then make me have to use the search command anyways? It doesn't even make searches any damn faster.

 

You get the idea. heh heh. We'd be sat here an awfully long time going through every single process on everyones computer trying to do this, and at the end of the day, you will have things that I have no idea what they do so I wouldn't say yay or nay to disabling them anyways. The fact that shutting off Norton bought you a few FPS does tend to make me lean towards the idea that your computer might just have a little too much to do at once though... but that could be an easy mis-diagnosis, and like I said, Norton is an exceptional processes glutton.

 

Jenrai

[ptbptb]

These are the tasks I've got running. (I chopped out the 'svchost' lot)

 

I think they are all either essential, or you can't kill them anyway. :rolleyes:

 

I have Japanese text input services and a pen-tablet that add a few - but I doubt they take up much resources.

 

[EDIT]wmpnetwk.exe can go, but it just turns itself back on if you kill it.

[Jenrai]

To be honest, I expected worse... I don't see an obvious reason that would be slowing your system down too much. Theres nothing there thats gulping either memory or processing. Hmm. Confused.

Is it just Oblivion that seems to run slow or do other games/programs seem to be spitting feathers too?

Does your computer seem to be running hot?

Silly questions, I know, just trying to help. :confused: :wallbash:

Theres certainly nothing there that would be inhibiting your processor too much. There are a few things I don't recognise, but hey. Not sure if the search index one is the same one as I was ranting about. heh heh.

[ptbptb]

Is it just Oblivion that seems to run slow or do other games/programs seem to be spitting feathers too?

I have no other games. :biggrin:

 

Does your computer seem to be running hot?

No.

 

Not sure if the search index one is the same one as I was ranting about. heh heh.

You can't kill that one anyway.

 

Anyway, thanks for all your help but I think I'll just wait until I have 40 pounds to spare and try a cheap-ish card with 512MB on it.

 

Unfortunately that may take a long time.