Poor Performance on Good Hardware

[suilenroc267]

3 reinstalls, dozens of mods, and 4 false starts later, and here I am. I've decided that it's time to sit down and play Oblivion again, something I haven't done for the longest time. So, I installed it, and immediately got started modding it. I failed the first time, as I expected, but I got the hang of things again. (I was a little rusty, to say the least.) The second time, I succeeded in getting a functional, if unstable, FCOM installation going, and I started a game. Not gonna lie, it was way too hard for the casual adventure I was looking for, so I reinstalled once more.

 

That time, I managed to get a decent setup. OOO+MMM, QTP3 redimized, some nice night sky replacers, Deadly Reflexes v5.0, All-Natural weather, Improved doors/flora/meats/etc., Bananasplit's better cities, Tamriel's NPC's Revamped, the unofficial patch, and a couple of minor things. (Capes and cloaks, little things like that one.)

 

And...the performance is horrible. HORRIBLE. I can pull 140 FPS while looking at a wall, but bring in more than a few more objects and actors and I quickly drop to ~15-20 FPS, which just doesn't seem right to me, considering my computer's specs. Which, btw, are here:

 

ATI Radeon 4850 GPU

Intel C2D 3.2 GHZ

4 GB DDR2 800 RAM

Recent and fast HDD.

Playing at 1920x1200.

 

Here's a list of mods that I'm planning on installing:

 

http://imgur.com/Lv61k.png

 

So, I'm coming to you guys for help. I can usually figure these things out, but I'm just having the hardest damn time. I've tried everything I can think of, and I refuse believe that this computer, which can, in fact, run Crysis (for serious) cannot run Oblivion, even with these mods.

 

Thanks for any help you give!

 

 

TL;DR: Powerful comp, not too many mods, horrible performance. Wat do?

[Tomlong54210]

Your specs are not amazing, and your mod list is very resource intensive. If you can keep ~20FPS with that you are doing fine. Post your load order. If it is wrong, that'll hurt your performance too. For more performance and stabilization suggestions, see the bottom of the opening post of my site's thread (second link in my sig.) Please, post your LO first, so that I can take a look at it.

 

Real Load Order - http://sites.google.com/site/oblivionpoinfo/runoblivion/loadorders <-- Some users running heavier loads than users, with slightly better specs, but your mod list is competing with them

 

 

Edit: Crisis and Oblivion run on very different engines, so comparing them is not useful or helpful. 140FPS staring at a wall means nothing. Oblivion is CPU-intensive. If there are no AI packages being processed in the direction you are looking, there is no load. You should use a mod to cap that considerably lower because you will not see that kind of FPS range when doing anything. The 15-20FPS is more telling.

[suilenroc267]

The load order, unfortunately, disappeared when I uninstalled Oblivion and cleaned out the old files. I just finished emptying the recycle bin, should have thought to save those.

 

Regardless, the load list was always autogenerated by BOSS, and I took care to pay attention to any red flags that it brought up.

 

And that's disheartening to hear that my specs aren't as good as I'd thought. This thing was top of the market when I got it - time flies, I guess.

 

Are there any mods that you would recommend over some of these, or some that would suggest I get rid of to improve performance? I'm getting rid of Deadly Reflexes, and installing the Standard instead of HD version of Enhanced water. What else should I do?

 

Thanks for the help, btw.

[suilenroc267]

Taking a look at those links, they seem like pretty common sense suggestions. I was playing around with the Oblivion PyFFI automator, and was planning on running that on my Meshes folder as soon as I installed the latest official patch. Would that be advisable?

[Tomlong54210]

Enhanced Water is not making a big difference. The HD vs ND is for HDR vs. not HDR. The biggest change in your performance would be seen by not using Open Cities. I would need to see your load order to make more suggestions. Often, at least in the case of FCOM, some plugins are more CPU-intensive than others. The 4850 is fine (It's 1GB, right?) so your limitation is your CPU, which is the norm with Oblivion. That is just how the system is designed. It was planned before the multi-core technology really took off. There are no real way to make it take advantage of two cores directly, but it does benefit from the newer technology as much as the rest of your computer does.

 

See the performance and optimization links toward the bottom of the opening post of my thread. Hold off on Albertine's guide (if it peaks your interest) until after setting up Oblivion and making the other suggested changes. You should have something stable to compare his tweaks with because they go beyond the scope of Oblivion (i.e., tweaking your video card, making less "secure" INI edits and whatnot.) That guide has been a big help for some, but you will not know how much it is helping if you do it all at once.

[suilenroc267]

Yeah, the 4850 is the 1GB version. And I'll take Open Cities out, thanks for the suggestion. I'll get to modding now, and I'll check out those guides. I'll report back once it's all done.

[suilenroc267]

Update: Finished installing all of the mods, Oblivion folder done defragmenting, and I was able to play just fine through the sewers. My framerate is a constant 30, and it appears to be capped at that for some reason, it won't go higher than that, even when looking straight on at a wall. Vsync is disabled in the options, however. Any ideas? (If not, it's all good. 30FPS isn't something to complain about, considering my previous position.)

[Tomlong54210]

If you have that cap set in Streamline and OSR, it will stay there (unless your system is running the game so well that even those utilities cannot cap it there.) It is best to set those caps to even numbers. You can try raising the cap in OSR and SL to 60 if you want. The point of capping is to keep gameplay smooth. If you prefer the jumps with slightly higher FPS (on occasion) that may be preferable to you.