Help me optimize

[CptAwesome91]

I'd like some help optimizing Oblivion to run at its best on my system without sacrificing much visual quality. When I'm out in the wilderness, throw as much grass and trees at me as you want and my frame rate stays up between 50 and 60, but near NPCs (especially in cities) I get a drastic drop.

 

I am using a bunch of graphics enhancing mods, most of which don't impact FPS at all. However, I just installed Better Cities, and now I'm looking at between 15 and 25 FPS in cities. I was expecting that, I know that is a beefy mod, but I'm hoping there are things I can do to make Oblivion take full advantage of my particular hardware to hopefully get in-city FPS up to between 25 and 35 where it is more playable.

 

Here is my setup:

CPU: Intel i7 quad-core @ 2.8 GHz

GPU: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 1GB

RAM: 6 GB DDR3

 

I'm using Streamline, but I can't say I've noticed it working much (game still stutters, didn't notice increase in FPS). I'm looking for mods or .ini tweaks or other methods of increasing FPS, hopefully without sacrificing much if any visual quality.

 

Got any tips?

[Valkyrie]

Some good stuff here: link

[CptAwesome91]

Thanks, some of that stuff was helpful. Upon further investigation, I found another tweak guide with something that really intrigued me. Since Oblivion doesn't seem to make very good use of multi-core processors, my performance suffers. I found the following at TweakGuides.com:

 

"Multithreading Tweaks:

 

bUseThreadedBlood=1

bUseThreadedMorpher=1

bUseThreadedTempEffects=1

bUseThreadedParticleSystem=1

bUseMultiThreadedTrees=1

bUseMultiThreadedFaceGen=1

iNumHavokThreads=5

iThreads=9

iOpenMPLevel=10

 

All of the above settings seem to relate to the use of the GameBryo engine's multithreading capability. Multithreading splits tasks into 'threads' where possible, and runs them in parallel across both cores of multi core or HyperThreading (virtual multi core) CPUs to improve performance. Note that raising the values of the iThreads, iNumHavokThreads and iOpenMPLevel settings very high doesn't automatically mean it uses that many threads - it all depends on how many threads are actually possible based on the information being processed. Experiment with these variables but if you experience problems reset them back to their defaults."

 

I like that I can tell Oblivion to try and use more cores, but can somebody tell me what values I should use for my particular processor? ( I have 4 physical cores, each split into 2 virtual cores for a total of 8 virtual cores)