Utilizing only 1 core?? Solutions?

[Deleted606973User]

I have heard that Oblivion only runs on a single CPU core. I have a Phenom II X4 965 OC'd @ 3.5gHz and I occasionally get 12 fps in certain areas. Is there any known way to change the settings so that Oblivion will take advantage of all cores? Any help or advice will be greatly appreciated. I'll provide my full system specs below..

 

CPU - AMD Phenom II X4 965 @ 3.51gHz (stock cooling - 58c-60c idle temp....)

Board - ASUS M3A78-CM ~NB @ 2000mHz (stock)

Storage - Western Digital Caviar 320GB HD 7200rpm

RAM - 4GB DDR2-667 (5-5-5-15)

Graphics - EVGA GeForce GTX 285 1GB

Operating System - Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

PSU - Antec Earthwatts 650w

Case - Factory Gateway ATX

[Illiad86]

Woah...I hope you mean 60C full load? Sitting at those temps idle is not normal or good. 72C is the "death number" remember :tongue:

 

To my knowledge, there is no way that you can make Oblivion harness more than one core. Most games and applications still are not multi-threaded. The only game that I've played so far that does is Half Life 2...and just come to find out that The Witcher does too haha.

 

This guy explained it well:

 

As someone who has programmed/ designed multi-threaded software (althoug not games, thankfully!), I can vouch for it's difficulty. Or at least it's difficulty to "do right".

 

There are two reasons one would use parallelisim (multi-threadin): One, it lends itself naturally to the design. If your program is going to need to do two seperate tasks at the same time, then a multi-threaded approach is the natural one. For example, if you need to "design an algorithm to bake two cakes", it's pretty easy to say "seperate into two threads/chefs, each of them baking their own cake". It actually becomes more difficult, from the design side, to try and keep that single threaded. Eg. "How to bake two cakes at the same time, with only one chef". Where you have to complete multiple tasks at once and try and balance your time between them.

 

The other reason is for performance. If you have a single task, but hardware that would support multiple lines of execution, you can finish that task faster, if you break up the work so that multiple things can be done at once. It's not as easy as the first one, because usually the design does not naturally lend itself to being split up. It is a single task afterall. So you have to get creative in how you are willing to split it up. An example would be single photo rendering (Saw a demo last year from AMD using dual cpu dual core opteron's ). Naturally you would just go through and render out the whole thing in one pass. But instead, to take advantage of all the cores, they broke it up into sections, so one core would work on the top, the other the bottom, at the same time.

 

The sad part is, that for gaming, it's often the second case. Infact, some things just naturally CAN"T be parallised at all. (Eg. Baking a single cake. No matter what you do, you HAVE to mix it before you can bake it. There is no way to split it up so that you can bake the cake before your mix the ingredients. So parallelism (an extra chef) wouldn't help for that situation).

It is difficult to change your design, to figure out how to split up tasks and divide the work evenly between them. Some times it's even impossible.

 

All this is just talk about design, not even touching on implementation. Not only is it tricky to design multi-threads, it's tricky to program them. There are lots of little tricks/ gotchas and things you must be mindfull of (eg. if two threads try to change the same data at the same time) when doing the actual implementation. Much more so then if you didn't worry about parallelisation. If you have two people doing two things at once, you have to make sure they are coordinated, dont' get into each others way, share the equipment properly, etc. (Eg. two chefs in a kitchen).

 

We are no doubt going in this direction. It's cheaper performance/price wise to make 2 slower cores, rather than 1 faster one. But it's not all roses. Some tasks can't even be made to use this, or if they do, will show minimal benefit. And those that do are quite often very tricky.

 

I dont' envy those game programmers/designers

 

Oblivion is weird anyways, there's certain spots where the frames are horrid and other where it's smooth as butter.

[Deleted606973User]

Woah...I hope you mean 60C full load? Sitting at those temps idle is not normal or good. 72C is the "death number" remember :tongue:

 

 

Yeah, I'm really not sure why my CPU is always running so hot (idling @ 56c right now). It's probably because I'm using the stock fan with stock thermal grease. It would be really difficult to squeeze a real heatsink in there, assuming I could even fit it in my small ATX tower case. Perhaps I should invest in a new case and go from there. Anyway, thanks for the advice. I'm sure there's been a handful of threads like this.

[Illiad86]

It's running hot because that CPU is 140W haha :tongue: Wow, that thing is wicked fast as it is.Do you have it OC'ed? I wouldn't OC that CPU without an aftermarket cooler. Yeah, I'd consider putting some high quality thermal compound on the heatsink. Ah, got a Micro ATX case? Erk, I wouldn't put a 140W CPU in a Micro ATX case...gotta have good airflow.

 

I have that stock cooler on my Windsor 5200+...sits 22 C idle and about 55C on full load...but it's only at 2.6GHz right now....I had it overclocked at 3.2GHz and it never got above 60C full load. Lol, so it's godly on a dual core :tongue:

 

Yeah...I wish Oblivion used multiple cores...

 

Have you tweaked your .ini yet for the game?

 

http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_1.html

 

I gained some FPS and there's a little less studdering.

 

Also, you have a sound card or what type of onboard do you have? Really crappy onboard can affect the game pretty significantly. My mate just gave me a XFI Xtreme Gamer Pro and the game runs a lot smoother now in areas where it ran crappy before.

[Deleted606973User]

It's running hot because that CPU is 140W haha :tongue: Wow, that thing is wicked fast as it is.Do you have it OC'ed? I wouldn't OC that CPU without an aftermarket cooler. Yeah, I'd consider putting some high quality thermal compound on the heatsink. Ah, got a Micro ATX case? Erk, I wouldn't put a 140W CPU in a Micro ATX case...gotta have good airflow.

 

I have that stock cooler on my Windsor 5200+...sits 22 C idle and about 55C on full load...but it's only at 2.6GHz right now....I had it overclocked at 3.2GHz and it never got above 60C full load. Lol, so it's godly on a dual core :tongue:

 

Yeah...I wish Oblivion used multiple cores...

 

Have you tweaked your .ini yet for the game?

 

http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_1.html

 

I gained some FPS and there's a little less studdering.

 

Also, you have a sound card or what type of onboard do you have? Really crappy onboard can affect the game pretty significantly. My mate just gave me a XFI Xtreme Gamer Pro and the game runs a lot smoother now in areas where it ran crappy before.

 

I still really need to fix up my computer. Right now I only have 1 (90mm) case fan which would help explain the insane temps. If I can manage to fit something like an Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro 92mm CPU fan in there on top of some Arctic Silver and then install a 120mm case fan on the side panel, perhaps that could change how things are working now. I'm actually kind of hesitant about installing a PCI sound card because of airflow/my mobo is puny. I have decent 8-channel audio on the board, drivers are all up to date and there's no quality issues there.

 

And DAAANG that 5200+ sounds pretty awesome. I could only get to 2.8gHz with my old 5050e which replaced the stock 3800+ (2.0gHz yuck..). You can only clock so high though, especially in my predicament.

 

Thank you for the link. I just added several graphical optimization mods including Operation Optimization, Quiet Feet, Streamline and Low Poly Grass. They are helping quite a bit actually, but I will make sure I get my .ini squared away. Just kind of wish I was awesome enough to own a Core i7 Extreme, water cool and OC to 5.1gHz like some people have, then maybe I'd have a couple more fps :tongue:

[Tomlong54210]

A sound card would take pressure off of your CPU while playing, so it is a good investment. Another good investment is a PCI slot fan to pull heat away from your video card, but as the CPU takes the most burden in Oblivion, and you do not have much space, I suggest investing in the former option.

 

About optimization: Operation Optimization is buggy, and the Oblivion Tweak Guide is out of date in a number of places.

 

Pulled from this thread:

Optimization Mods

Stabilization Mods

Oblivion.ini Tweaks

SL.ini Tweaks

Outdated Optimization

 

 

Edit:

[Guide] How to Smooth PC Oblivion FPS - BethSoft thread by Albertine

PC Specs & Speculations <-- If you are wondering which hardware parts matter most

 

 

Edit: Just wanted to add...Although Oblivion does not take advantage of multiple cores (the INI edits are ignored for multithreading) it is never the only process running, so your system still benefits from the multicore arrangement, not to mention the newer processor architecture.