Low FPS after a few minutes of play.

[Aguni84]

Did you also run a check to see what programs were using how much CPU processing power as well?

If anything, you can always check through the oblivion application and make sure its running with full permission.

[GetOutOfBox]

 

I thin the problem may be your GPU. As I said it could be a case of it being simply too new and causing issues with Oblivion. I do, think, however that perhaps you should try installing the unofficial patches. Primarily because they do fix several bugs within the game and it MIGHT just solve the problem.

 

Edit: Actually, before you do that, run Oblivion and also check to see its effect on your CPU. Perhaps there may be something going on that is eating up CPU processing power while you are running the game. I have heard of cases where rundll32.dll was eating up over 50% of the CPU's processing.

 

rundll32.dll is a critical operating system component, you should not be screwing around with that. And there is no such thing as a GPU "being too new" and causing performance issues, as the hardware of the GPU is not directly accessible, games are programmed using the DirectX API. If the GPU supports the DirectX API version required, then there will be no issues caused by the card having hardware newer than the hardware available at the time the game was released. Basically, the hardware architecture of a video card is transparent to the game, it is unaffected by i.e, how the memory bus is designed, as DirectX creates an abstraction layer between applications and the hardware. DirectX handles how data is placed in the video cards RAM, not the application caching the data.

 

Yes, the multithreading options in the ini appear to have little effect on game performance, but there are other variables that can be tweaked and provide a great performance boost, especially the memory allocation variables, by default oblivions ini is tailored for a PC with around 512MB-1GB of RAM, though since most modern PC's have 3GB and up, you can tweak the ini so that oblivion can (it's not forced to) take advantage of additional resources. Basically, there are still many options that can be tweaked to increase performance.

 

I suggest reading the excellent tutorial over at Tweak Guides, they have both a guide for in-game settings, and the INI settings (the ini settings are in the "Advanced Tweaking" sections):

 

Oblivion Tweaking

Edited December 13, 2010 by GetOutOfBox

[Aguni84]

 

I thin the problem may be your GPU. As I said it could be a case of it being simply too new and causing issues with Oblivion. I do, think, however that perhaps you should try installing the unofficial patches. Primarily because they do fix several bugs within the game and it MIGHT just solve the problem.

 

Edit: Actually, before you do that, run Oblivion and also check to see its effect on your CPU. Perhaps there may be something going on that is eating up CPU processing power while you are running the game. I have heard of cases where rundll32.dll was eating up over 50% of the CPU's processing.

 

rundll32.dll is a critical operating system component, you should not be screwing around with that. And there is no such thing as a GPU "being too new" and causing performance issues, as the hardware of the GPU is not directly accessible, games are programmed using the DirectX API. If the GPU supports the DirectX API version required, then there will be no issues caused by the card having hardware newer than the hardware available at the time the game was released. Basically, the hardware architecture of a video card is transparent to the game, it is unaffected by i.e, how the memory bus is designed, as DirectX creates an abstraction layer between applications and the hardware. DirectX handles how data is placed in the video cards RAM, not the application caching the data.

 

Yes, the multithreading options in the ini appear to have little effect on game performance, but there are other variables that can be tweaked and provide a great performance boost, especially the memory allocation variables, by default oblivions ini is tailored for a PC with around 512MB-1GB of RAM, though since most modern PC's have 3GB and up, you can tweak the ini so that oblivion can (it's not forced to) take advantage of additional resources. Basically, there are still many options that can be tweaked to increase performance.

 

I suggest reading the excellent tutorial over at Tweak Guides, they have both a guide for in-game settings, and the INI settings (the ini settings are in the "Advanced Tweaking" sections):

 

Oblivion Tweaking

 

No I was not suggesting messing with rundll32.dll. In my case I found I had to enable the game to have full permissions before I could have any decent performance out of the game (which was rather odd).

Hence my suggestion n checking to see if possibly his CPU's processing was being wasted on something else.

 

My suggestion on the hardware was primarily because from my experience, some applications tend to get along with older GPU's than the newer ones.

Edited December 13, 2010 by Aguni84

[GetOutOfBox]

My suggestion on the hardware was primarily because from my experience, some applications tend to get along with older GPU's than the newer ones.

 

Which is not possible, since as I said already, applications are written for DirectX, not a specific GPU(s). The internal operations of a video card are completely transparent to the game. The only exception to this is if the card has a bad implementation of DirectX, which has only been known to happen once, with an old NVIDIA series, and that was considered a serious issue at the time that was fixed immediately in the next card revision. The 4000/5000 series have not been known to have such issues, as they would be immediately obvious to reviewers.

[Aguni84]

My suggestion on the hardware was primarily because from my experience, some applications tend to get along with older GPU's than the newer ones.

 

Which is not possible, since as I said already, applications are written for DirectX, not a specific GPU(s). The internal operations of a video card are completely transparent to the game. The only exception to this is if the card has a bad implementation of DirectX, which has only been known to happen once, with an old NVIDIA series, and that was considered a serious issue at the time that was fixed immediately in the next card revision. The 4000/5000 series have not been known to have such issues, as they would be immediately obvious to reviewers.

 

I do think that in most cases that is true, but there are application such as Secondlife in which a superior ATI GPU will perform terribly in comparison to an inferior NVIDIA.

 

Also consider this that I mentioned my area 51 laptop with an ATI mobility 3870 HD which is certainly inferior to his sapphire. It makes little sense for something that is in every single way inferior, to be producing superior results.

 

By no means am I disagreeing with you, but there has to be something that is creating such a large difference.

Edited December 13, 2010 by Aguni84

[GetOutOfBox]

There are many possibilities as to whats causing his speed issues, to mention a few:

 

1. His Power Supply maybe has insufficient amperage on the 12-volt rail, which may allow the graphics card to function, but just barely.

 

2. A deffective card, though this is unlikely if other games work fine.

 

3. Oblivion has misdetected his video cards shader capabilities and is using an inferior shader package

 

And of course the likely cause of your 3870 outperforming his 5550, is that the 3870 is a high-end card, albeit older, while his 5550 is literally the bottom of the 5000 series. Your card has a GPU clock of 775mhz, his 550 mhz, your card has a memory clock of 1125mhz, his card 400mhz, your card as 1GB of video ram, his 512 mb.

 

Basically, your card is vastly superior to his in everything except DirectX support, and since Oblivion is made for DX9, which both cards support, the fact that the 5550 has DX11 support is meaningless in this case.

[Aguni84]

There are many possibilities as to whats causing his speed issues, to mention a few:

 

1. His Power Supply maybe has insufficient amperage on the 12-volt rail, which may allow the graphics card to function, but just barely.

 

2. A deffective card, though this is unlikely if other games work fine.

 

3. Oblivion has misdetected his video cards shader capabilities and is using an inferior shader package

 

And of course the likely cause of your 3870 outperforming his 5550, is that the 3870 is a high-end card, albeit older, while his 5550 is literally the bottom of the 5000 series. Your card has a GPU clock of 775mhz, his 550 mhz, your card has a memory clock of 1125mhz, his card 400mhz, your card as 1GB of video ram, his 512 mb.

 

Basically, your card is vastly superior to his in everything except DirectX support, and since Oblivion is made for DX9, which both cards support, the fact that the 5550 has DX11 support is meaningless in this case.

 

 

 

*facepalms himself for forgetting*

Bah I had forgotten that the his sapphire had a lower clock speed and presumed it higher.

On the other hand, I had thought that Oblivion's recommended settings are well within the range of his computer's specs. Even if there was lower performance, it wouldn't be enough to account for having extremely low FPS, even more so if he is capable of running other games smoothly.

[GetOutOfBox]

There are many possibilities as to whats causing his speed issues, to mention a few:

 

1. His Power Supply maybe has insufficient amperage on the 12-volt rail, which may allow the graphics card to function, but just barely.

 

2. A deffective card, though this is unlikely if other games work fine.

 

3. Oblivion has misdetected his video cards shader capabilities and is using an inferior shader package

 

And of course the likely cause of your 3870 outperforming his 5550, is that the 3870 is a high-end card, albeit older, while his 5550 is literally the bottom of the 5000 series. Your card has a GPU clock of 775mhz, his 550 mhz, your card has a memory clock of 1125mhz, his card 400mhz, your card as 1GB of video ram, his 512 mb.

 

Basically, your card is vastly superior to his in everything except DirectX support, and since Oblivion is made for DX9, which both cards support, the fact that the 5550 has DX11 support is meaningless in this case.

 

 

 

*facepalms himself for forgetting*

Bah I had forgotten that the his sapphire had a lower clock speed and presumed it higher.

On the other hand, I had thought that Oblivion's recommended settings are well within the range of his computer's specs. Even if there was lower performance, it wouldn't be enough to account for having extremely low FPS, even more so if he is capable of running other games smoothly.

 

I'm guessing the poor performance is probably also due to the monitor resolution he's using, which he didn't mention. If you want to use a large resolution in any game, Crossfire/SLI is a must, as performance will experience an extreme drop in single card setups. He probably like most PC builders (including myself at one point ;) neglected the Power Supply, if the PSU's amperage on the 12-Volt rail is not sufficient for the card, the card may still run, but with subtle errors and performance fluctuations. It's generally difficult to effectively test a component to be completely stable, as some "instructions" are difficult to be written in such a way a checksum is reliably calculated. This is especially true with video cards, due to the Hardware Abstraction Layer in the form of DirectX, with CPU's you can just use assembly language, doing so with GPU's is much more difficult.

 

He may also have damaged or incorrectly configured RAM, as often the system will boot and appear to be operating normally, but may operate slower or have functions crash or return strange results. Testing for memory errors is generally easy, using a utility like memtest86+