Rock-Solid Oblivion System

[Tenlethar]

Hi,

 

A short intro on my side: i have bought a new gaming machine, high end, spent hours and days and weeks tweaking it, testing it.. whatever i do though, i can't play Oblivion properly on this machine. It just won't work. I get flickering grass and shadow errors, flickering with reflections on the water and i get shimmering textures where there should not be any. Aside from this, when i open some container or barrel in Oblivion, i need to wait for more than 1,5 seconds for the data to load, even though i run the game from an SSD drive. Its as though there is a latency to it.

 

I spent at least 4 days now trying to figure out what the problem is. I tried NVIDIA and ATI cards, i tried various operating systems, .. i tried tweaking the game settings - trust me, i tried everything that i can, and now i am exhausted. My love for the game is so strong i would not even give up. Too bad, cause this will never work.

 

My impression is that the gamebryo engine can't and won't deal with new hardware properly. So i made a decision: **** it. I want to play this game and if it does not work with the new stuff, well then it will work with the old.

 

--------------------------------------------

So what am i going to do now?

 

Well i won't give up - so i decided to ask you guys (the community) if you might either:

 

1.) Be able to put together a rock-solid configuration for me and write it down? It does not need to be the newest gear - just whatever is proven to work.

 

and/or

 

2.) If you believe your system is rock-solid and stable for Oblivion and if you can run the game fluidly at an average of 60 FPS, if you don't get crashes or weird graphics glitches, then please post your system specs and a two-liner about your Oblivion experience/performance here and potential glitches and problems you have.

 

Please take the effort - thinking of how many people have trouble running the game, it would be so calming to know at leat a few setups that just work (if there are any?)

 

Thank you!

Edited December 6, 2010 by Tenlethar

[GetOutOfBox]

Unfortunately, Oblivion's programming is pretty bad. It's riddled with various bugs and memory leaks that can affect performance. The real issue though is that when Oblivion was first released, multi-core processors weren't as mainstream as they are today, it wasn't considered worth the extra effort to create games that utilized many multiple threads (believe me, as a programmer, I can tell you that handling multiple threads in even a small program can be a headache to say the least) Though the ini does have variables that appear to be related to turning multithreading on/off, its likely they don't actually do anything, or at the most Oblivion doesn't handle multiple threads well. Plus, 64-bit systems were just starting to become popular, so Bethseda didn't bother including a 64-bit executable with the PC version of Oblivion. That means Oblivion can only use 2.5GB of RAM max, even on a 64-bit system. Also, at the time, Crossfire/SLI setups were something only real PC enthusiasts had, most people only had 1 video card. Because of this, Oblivion doesn't really use Crossfired/SLIed cards as well as it could.

 

The best setup you can have is one with at least a single video card with high GPU and memory clock speeds, a processor with a high clock rate per core (for example, a 2.5GHZ Tri-Core processor would do much better in a video converting test that utilized multithreading than a single CPU clocked at 4GHZ. This is because the program splits the work across 3 cores, each working at 2.5GHZ. But if you take a program like Oblivion, which doesn't do multithreading at all, or at best does it terribly, then to that program you have 1 CPU running at 2.5GHZ, vs basically a 7.5GHZ performance if it were to use all of the cores),at least 4GB of RAM with high bandwidth and low latency (6GB would be best, any more is pointless, 4GB leaves 1.5GB for the OS and 2.5 for Oblivion, though if you have 6GB you add an extra 2GB for any memory usage spikes the OS has/misc programs in the background). Having a good sound card can take a considerable amount of work off of the CPU, since Oblivion often has quite a few sounds going at once. Make sure its not Onboard/an El Cheapo sound card, since those just use the CPU for processing, get a Creative X-Fi Titanium, it has a decent price, amazing sound quality, and quite a few features.

 

 

As for your issue with flickering, that's likely one of several issues:

 

1. NVIDIA cards have an issue with the game when you turn Anisotropic Filtering on, unless you clamp the Negative LOD Bias the video card will create shimmering artifacts. You can fix this by turning Anisotropic Filtering to "High Quality" mode.

2. A bad mod/conflicts between mods. If two textured planes position on the Z-axis are identical/extremely close (as in 1.0001 and 1), the card will intermittently alternate between drawing either of the textures, creating a flickering/clipping artifact.

 

Your performance issue is odd, I too have a high-end system, and I also don't get great performance, but I never have terrible performance. You likely are either experiencing a driver issue or there is a faulty component in your system. You may also have something overheating, which can terribly reduce performance.

[Tenlethar]

Wow, that's quite a tough reply. Thank you very much for the detail!

 

I have to say that performance ain't so much the issue for me. I do get a good performance out of the game, generally. Even though only with Streamline FPS will be smooth, and even though only with seeing trees appear and disappear right in my view, same with grass, objects.. other things (not sure if this is related to streamline).

 

The description you give about flickering is very much accurate, it seems to be exactly what you say, since grass sprites are very close to one another. However, i must say that i also tested everything with a vanilla install of Oblivion, and then even tested different grass mods - and i always get the same results. As for the shimmering, i read about the LOD-Bias but oddly enough even if i clamp it to a minimum of zero and even if i set to "High Quality" the shimmering will remain. I have the theory that it has something to do with parallaxed textures, since those seem to be where it appears - and usually only under strong lightning circumstances (when HDR makes it shine).

 

I'd be very happy if people could post their specs so i can consider assembling a cheaper but working Oblivion-only machine.

 

My system specs are these:

 

I currently run NVIDIA drivers 260.99 and the drives all run in AHCI mode (i only use SATA drives). All my drivers are up-to-date, including chipset and all that comes along with it.

 

PSU: ENERMAX MODU82+ with 625 Watts

Tower: COOLER MASTER Xcalade 690, PURE Black Edition

CPU: Intel Quad Core i7-920 4x2,67 Ghz

Cooling: Thermalright AXP-140 + Enermax Twister Cluster 120x120x25

Mainboard: P6T Deluxe V2

RAM: 6 GB DDR3 Kit PC3-1600 Mhz, CL8

Graphics: NVIDIA / ZOTAC GTX 480 AMP! Overclocked Edition

Harddrive: 35,2035,201SATA II SAMSUNG SpinPoint F3, 500GB, 16MB Cache

CD-Rom: DVD-+R/-+RW SATA LG GH-22NS40, Bulk, Black

OS: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64Bit DVD

Screen: SAMSUNG 2233 RZ TFT @ 120 Hz

 

My CPU is overclocked to 3,6 Ghz but the Overclock is stable and i also tried/tested Oblivion with the Overclocking disabled - but with no effect.

[bben46]

The trees appearing and disappearing are related to streamline. The way it works is by trading video features for FPS on the fly. It is actually manipulating those sliders for video quality that you can set. With streamline you no longer have control of that. And setting the FPS too high in Streamline just makes it worse. Try setting your streamline for a max of 28 FPS and a min of 20 and see if that helps. Even then, if your FPS drops below 20 it will start cutting back on video features (disappearing trees).

 

Try turning off the streamsight part of Streamline to see what difference that makes first. You will need to manually reset your video sliders after turning it off. Streamline was originally intended to make Oblivion run better on low end computers and sometimes makes it worse on better ones. Some of the other features make Streamline worth keeping though.

 

Then if you don't see any problems, start moving the min up until you do. If you get the min to the same as the max with no problems, start moving the max up. The idea is to get the best FPS without losing too much of your video features. Any FPS over 30 is actually better than the console version of the game which is locked at 30 FPS. (30 FPS is what movies run at)

 

Dropping the resolution by one step can also make a big difference - if you are running at the maximum allowable resolution for your monitor, try reducing that by one step to see what happens and how it looks.

[Smooth613]

A "lightweight" version of Streamline, Streamline 311, has recently been released and it's working well. I've been using it since release with no problems. It's just a trimmed down version of the original.

 

I only use the StreamPurge function anyway so it's perfect for my needs. However it also has StreamSave and StreamFight. StreamSave is the same save system as before and StreamFight is like Combat FPS Optimizer. It alters video settings and sliders, like Bben mentioned, but only in combat.

[Tenlethar]

A "lightweight" version of Streamline, Streamline 311, has recently been released and it's working well. I've been using it since release with no problems. It's just a trimmed down version of the original.

 

I only use the StreamPurge function anyway so it's perfect for my needs. However it also has StreamSave and StreamFight. StreamSave is the same save system as before and StreamFight is like Combat FPS Optimizer. It alters video settings and sliders, like Bben mentioned, but only in combat.

 

Thanks for those tips! I will try the new streamline once i have a stable and working basis to play on.

 

However, streamline (unfortunately, cause that would be easier to solve) is not my issue. My issue is the flickering grass textures, the flickering shadows on the grass as well as more than 1,5 seconds of delay/latency when opening a container (barrel, dead body, or whatever else comes up) :/

 

Edit: I'd really much like to know your guys PC specs

Edited December 6, 2010 by Tenlethar

[DrDrix]

Well if you want to know mine, I have:

 

Amd Athlon 64 XII dual core processor 4200 + 2.2 or about.

Nvidia Geforce 8800 Gt Akimbo by EVGA

500 Watt Psu by Cooler Master (I don't remember anything besides that :S)

Motherboard is a prefab from hp pavillon... sigh

3 Gb of DDR2 memory (pc2-5300)

 

and that's about all I know from my system (that matters a bit, lol)

 

I get, with Vanilla Oblivion, around 30 fps, which is really wierd since I had 40 when I had my clean Oblivion and Windows 7 install. But TES V coming out next year, so Oblivion's shortly gonna leave my life, hehe.

Edited December 15, 2010 by DrDrix

[GetOutOfBox]

But TES IV coming out next year, so Oblivion's shortly gonna leave my life, hehe.

 

http://mechanicalforex.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/time_paradox.jpg

 

hint: IV = 4

Edited December 15, 2010 by GetOutOfBox

[DrDrix]

I actually know, no need to spamm for that. A pm would've been fine. Now you can delete your post.