Strangely Low Performance on a High-End PC

[GetOutOfBox]

So I just finished upgrading my GPU and RAM, and was expecting to get at the very least a stable 40FPS, but instead get around 20FPS in cities and 30FPS in the main worldspace. I have some graphics enhancing mods, but I expected my new GPU to handle them easily, since my older Radeon 4850 ran them at an ok speed.

 

Only running Oblivion at 1280x1024

 

Main mods:

 

-QTP3 Redimized

-High-res textures for most plants

-All Natural

-Animated Window Lighting System

 

Specs:

 

Windows 7 x64

Phenom 2 X3 2.5GHZ

AMD Radeon 6870 1GB VRAM (940 mhz gpu clock, 1150 mhz memory clock (real clock, not the "Effective clock"))

4GB DDR2 800 RAM, CAS Latency = 4

Creative X-Fi Titanium Sound Card

2 Hard drives:

OS Drive: 32GB SSD

Game drive: 140GB SATA2 (Mechanical drive, 7200RPM)

750W Corsair PSU, Single 12V rail, rated for 61Amps

 

Possible causes I've checked for:

 

Reinstalled

Turned AA and AF completely off (makes a difference, but I still get low FPS, and my GPU should be able to handle at least 2x AA and 4x AF)

Temps, my comp case has 4 120mm fans going, I have a good heatsink. Max measured temps: 55C GPU, 49C CPU

Tested with other games, i.e Crysis. No issues there.

Tested RAM with memtest86+, CPU with Prime95. No errors.

Defragmented with Diskeeper (though not the SSD ;)

Ran "Check disk" on all drives

Patched Oblivion

Unofficial patched it as well

used BOSS to optimize the load order

RAM use never goes above 2GB, VRAM use never exceeds 550MB

Video card is running at correct clock speed during play

Uneeded background apps closed

Indexing service disabled

Shutdowned AV scanner completely

Optimized INI

Installed Streamline

VSync off

 

 

My guess is that since Oblivion doesn't use multiple cores well, 1 core at 2.5GHZ isn't enough for it. Anyone agree?

Edited December 4, 2010 by GetOutOfBox

[dazzerfong]

Oblivion's really harsh on the new hardware, especially multi-core CPUs and high-transistor count GPUs. Sorry.

[GetOutOfBox]

Oblivion's really harsh on the new hardware, especially multi-core CPUs and high-transistor count GPUs. Sorry.

 

That doesn't make sense since the transistor count of a GPU/CPU is completely transparent to the game, the game wouldn't be able to determine if the GPU had 1 transistor or 100000000000 transistors.

 

The performance wouldn't be reduced by having multiple cores, the game simply won't be able to take advantage of more than one core.

 

So basically, Oblivions probably really only using one core, and that means to Oblivion, I have a CPU running at 2.5GHZ. Should I upgrade to a 3GHZ model, which I can then overclock to 3.5GHZ possibly? I would just overclock my current CPU, but for whatever reason, when I upgraded the motherboard, any changes to the FSB for my non-Black Edition CPU make it unstable.

[Qwaxalot]

Oblivion's really harsh on the new hardware, especially multi-core CPUs and high-transistor count GPUs. Sorry.

 

That doesn't make sense since the transistor count of a GPU/CPU is completely transparent to the game, the game wouldn't be able to determine if the GPU had 1 transistor or 100000000000 transistors.

 

The performance wouldn't be reduced by having multiple cores, the game simply won't be able to take advantage of more than one core.

 

So basically, Oblivions probably really only using one core, and that means to Oblivion, I have a CPU running at 2.5GHZ. Should I upgrade to a 3GHZ model, which I can then overclock to 3.5GHZ possibly? I would just overclock my current CPU, but for whatever reason, when I upgraded the motherboard, any changes to the FSB for my non-Black Edition CPU make it unstable.

 

Your speculations regarding Oblivion and multi-core processors is exactly right.

 

And yes, a higher clock speed gives an immediate improvement to Oblivion.

[GetOutOfBox]

Ok, thanks. So I'm going to get a Phenom 2 Quad Core, default clock 3GHZ and overclock it to at least 3.5GHZ, possibly 4GHZ if I can push it higher without watercooling.

 

Also, which kinds of mods are most likely to create constant strain on the the proccessor? I know mods that have scripts constantly running are the most strenous, but which types of mods (aside from obvious mods like window lighting systems) are most likely to have scripts that constantly run? And I've heard that some games like Oblivion actually perform better (I don't mean that 1080p res will perform better than 1280x1024, but that performance scales much better at higher resolutions, i.e low resolutions don't perform as well as they should, but higher resolutions performances seem to produce more predictable FPS). Is this true?

[Nightaria]

-QTP3 Redimized

-High-res textures for most plants

The retextures mods always decrease performance. Even you have Core I7 - this pack eat 50% of you fps(