Beast Machine, bad performance

[shakuvendell]

Update: new install on a new system:

cpu- core i7 2600k @4.6 GHz

ram- 8GB ddr3 dual channel @2000 MHz

motherboard- Asus Maximus IV Extreme

video card- 3x hd 6950 oc 840/1325 in CrossfireX

hdd- triple 1tb hdd (2x sata III 1x sata II)

 

This is a $3,000 computer, and oddly it showed no performance boost near torches than the smaller previous generation computer I had... and I think I ve a common denominator. Radeon. all the computers in question have Radeon graphics cards with dx11! (assuming the op had good performance on his old computer)

[blaharg]

Not sure if this has been mentioned yet... But it's worth noting that Oblivion has a design "flaw" that prevents it from using more than a specific amount of a computer's hardware - mostly (if not entirely) graphics card related Thus, a higher end machine, with just "more," won't perform as well as an older machine with "less," but higher quality parts (IE, faster/more efficient).

[AnimalRiot]

You'll still need to install DirectX 9 as Oblivion is a DX9 game.

[HeyYou]

There is definitely a "hard ceiling" for hardware as far as oblivion is concerned. The game engine doesn't care about multi-core CPU's, or multiple GPU's either. I would bet that you could run your processor at stock clocks, and only use a single GPU, and see the exact same performance.......

[LordEmm]

Hi, OP here,

 

since i last posted a lot has changed (Computer Hardware, Load Order etc), so i can not realistically compare... however i can say that i do not believe it is the ATI card. I have used nothing but ATI for years now and first played Oblivion on a 1900XTX and after that on a HD3870 (after i got a bigger monitor, i had to update the card as well). On both cards the game was stable. and ran smoothly out of the box. I did not have a lot of mods back then obviously. There may have changes something between the 38xx and the 48xx and later cards since when i updated to a 4850 i first noticed the problems of slowdowns.

 

I do realize that Oblivion is not multicore optimised, but it is not true that it won't work well on crossfire or that it makes no difference. It may be that newer cards have problems with DX9 games, as i do not have any other hardware hungry DX9 games to test this out with. Another difference would be Windows 7 64 bit, instead of Windows XP sp2 32bit as it was back then... i am assuming it may be a combination of all of the above.

 

I should also note that Fallout3 experiences huge performance gains depending on which cards i had installed and whether it was Xfire or not. Of course that game had the bonus of a slightly less flawed engine, or rather better optimised for newer hardware i guess.

 

I am currently using a radeon HD6970 on AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition at 3.6Ghz... the extra 1GB Vram does seem to help, and the only time i slow down now is in NPC heavy areas, which is a limit of the Radiant AI engine and nothing the hardware can compensate i believe. Lights, Textures etc, have absolutely no influence. The only other thing that does influence my game is RAEVWD, especially the Imperial City part of it (which i just turned off since it also caused crashes when i was in the Imperial Waterfront with Better Cities active). Outside of the IC the FPS loss of RAEVWD is negligent though.

 

One of these days i will go back and re-build my system as it was back then and see if there is indeed one point where it got worse to have better hardware...

[AnimalRiot]

Ditto on the performance drop around multiple NPCs and RAEVWD Imperial City mod. Also running some OBGE shaders get a performance hit. Other than that I can say Oblivion runs pretty smoothly on today's decently spec'd rigs.

[MarkInMKUK]

Questions:

(1) Is antivirus disabled - if it's set to scan on denmand it could slug response on ANY file access.

(2) Try decompressing all the BSA archives and running with the uncompressed contents instead - does that speed stuff up?

(3) Sound card - use a separate card not onboard, just in case.

[Fonger]

(2) Try decompressing all the BSA archives and running with the uncompressed contents instead - does that speed stuff up?

that usually slows down any system

[LordEmm]

Questions:

(1) Is antivirus disabled - if it's set to scan on denmand it could slug response on ANY file access.

 

Kaspersky has an option that tells it to shut up basically when games are running. That means it will not update, scan, or do anything else except for basic firewall duties while a game is running. But yeah just in case i also had it shut down completely, but that is not the problem here (although curiously it was a problem with the Sims 3, at least until i knew how to fix that).

 

(2) Try decompressing all the BSA archives and running with the uncompressed contents instead - does that speed stuff up?

 

I agree with Fonger here, having MORE files in the directory is not a good idea generally and only advisable when you have missing meshes or textures that for some reason can not be read out of the BSA file. However i have Oblivion on a very fast SSD, so that makes no difference to me.

 

(3) Sound card - use a separate card not onboard, just in case.

 

Obviously! Who would seriously consider gaming with onboard sound these days? Okay that was meant to be half sarcastic, but yeah i do have a Creative SB X-Fi Titanium, and while that definitely improved sound and music on my system, it again had no impact on performance (as the onboard card had RAM set aside as well for itself, as is common on high end ASUS boards).

 

But thanks for your suggestions :)

[LordEmm]

@AnimalRiot

 

on my newest install (i now use Multiple Oblivion Manager to have several completely different builds so i can compare quickly), i decided to give Liquid Water a try, and i must say it looks awesome. I did not notice ANY performance drop because of that (although in some areas there is a slight delay before the default water gets replaced, especially noticeable when loading a savegame for the first time).

 

I have not played around with the other OBGE shaders, mainly because i don't see a reason to as from the pictures they all look quite useless. There is a default Godrays that gets installed with OBGE i guess, since i noticed my sun suddenly looking different as well, but i don't care enough about that. I just wanted the water!