Massive fps drop

[eviltidus]

Hi there.

As the title says, I'm having random massive fps drops in this game. I have the latest patch installed, latest ATI drivers, no DLC, a few mods, and I'm running it on a laptop.

The game usually runs at 40 fps, but sometimes drops to 10 or less, randomly (but occurs often during battles).

I guess this could be a heat issue, but I don't experience anything like that in other games.

[RustyBlade]

I'm running it on a laptop.

 

That pretty much says it all right there. Laptop video is dependent on system RAM and the game just loves to chew up every bit it can take leaving very little for your GPU to work with. Hopefully you are at least using XP or Win7 and not Vista :rolleyes:

 

Best thing you can do is dial back the graphics settings, get rid of any mods that add areas to the game (RAM suckers), take a 20 min cooling break every two hours (or play in a large freezer) and reboot at least once or twice a day to purge your RAM.

 

Additionally you may want to try the 1.04 patch as it allegedly addressed some of those RAM issues.

[DarkeWolf]

you can also plug the lappy into the wall socket and turn off your power management settings. (should be an icon in your system tray, down by the system clock in the bottom right hand corner of the screen).

The power management will tune down the system performance in order to conserve/extend battery power/usage. Which means it turns down the CPU cycle rate, cuts RAM bus speed and cycles, video (video is THE biggest power draw in a lappy seconded by the CPU) well... to cut it short, power saving mode can really throttle down your system.

 

And yes, this game is a massive hog on system resources. it has a memory leak that is hell on wheels to a lot of desktop systems. And I really am sorry to say it, but laptop systems just dont have the performance of a PC. :/

[bben46]

On a laptop the system ram is usually shared by the video system, so even if you think you have a lot of ram you probably don't. A 4g ram can have over 1g used by the video system. then another 1g used by the operating system and other programs - if you have a VOIP program, or an IM running in the background thay can take up another 1g of ram if a call comes in or it is checking for and downloading messages in the background. Any program that downloads stuff in the background (MS update, an automatic antivirus update ) will slow things down while they are downloading and installing their updates.

[DarkeWolf]

very good points Ben, thanks for filling in the gaps that we missed ;)

Wifi can also throw a loop on power saving mode, as that radio sucks down a lot of juice (ask anybody who uses it on a cell phone, Ipod, or other mobile device) so shutting that down for the time being might help as well.

[madd_6233]

Hi there. I'm also experiencing a similar yet different FPS drop as eviltidus. My FPS dropped insanely whenever I fought a Dremora, or anything that equipped with Daedric equipment. I'm also playing in laptop, but I remember that when I first played Oblivion, I never encountered this problem before. Can anyone give me any clue as to what caused this?

[DarkeWolf]

Madd- possibly the textures involved. Perhaps they were too high resolution for your lappy to handle very well?

Have you added any mods that increase the textures used with those models? Or increased the poly count of the meshes involved?

 

Or in the case of my old computer when I played Morrowind, my system would lock up on massive amounts of spell FX. Daedra were big on casting lots of spells, and occasionally they would lock my system up from too much spells.

[Thandal]

Hi there. I'm also experiencing a similar yet different FPS drop as eviltidus. My FPS dropped insanely whenever I fought a Dremora, or anything that equipped with Daedric equipment. I'm also playing in laptop, but I remember that when I first played Oblivion, I never encountered this problem before. Can anyone give me any clue as to what caused this?

Ummm, this is the DA, not TES Forums area. Very different game engines. Although the usual "Set graphics to something lower.", "Get more RAM.", and "Shut/Stop/Remove unnecessary programs." advice is probably applicable to any graphics-intensive game being played on a lappy. :thumbsup:

[madd_6233]

Whoops, I apologize. I was searching for a topic about fps drop, and this topic pops up. I didn't paid attention to which forum this topic belonged to. Sorry. I still have some questions though, but I think I'll just PM DarkeWolf, if you don't mind.

[Aspin53]

Just dropping a note in here on similar issues.

 

If your Op Sys is Win 7 and you are running Windows Anti virus (Windows Defender) try turning off "Real Time Protection".

 

It seems to be suspicious of every move that DAo makes. My FPS jumped from Unplayable (0.1 to 3.0 FPS) to a substantial 50 to 64.

 

This worked for me, hope the sugestion helps someone else.