horrible fps in towns

[Six_inches_shy_of_hung]

Im getting horrible fps in towns, but the framerate is flying outside, and in dungeon area's. which i find odd i thought it was the other way around for most people that they got good fps in towns and caves and the like, im getting good fps outside as well. any help is much appreciated. i am running a x2 4200+ @ 2.7 ghz, 2 gigs of pc3200 ram, a 7900 gtx if my setup details are needed.

[Dilvish]

There are lots of scripts and lots of sounds running in the towns. Have you gone through a tweak guide or two and played around with the in-game settings? You may have to change your settings to make performance in towns acceptable even if the forest isn't as pretty as it was.

 

You have a pretty good system. You're really overclocking the CPU. Do you get worse performance in towns at 2.2 mhz?

Do you have integrated audio? I've read that some people have problems with slowdowns in the towns because their audio can't deal with all the NPC footsteps/talking.

 

You can turn off the sound in your .ini for a few minutes to see if it helps:

bMusicEnabled=1 (change to 0)

bSoundEnabled=1 (change to 0)

[Six_inches_shy_of_hung]

There are lots of scripts and lots of sounds running in the towns. Have you gone through a tweak guide or two and played around with the in-game settings? You may have to change your settings to make performance in towns acceptable even if the forest isn't as pretty as it was.

 

You have a pretty good system. You're really overclocking the CPU. Do you get worse performance in towns at 2.2 mhz?

Do you have integrated audio? I've read that some people have problems with slowdowns in the towns because their audio can't deal with all the NPC footsteps/talking.

 

You can turn off the sound in your .ini for a few minutes to see if it helps:

bMusicEnabled=1 (change to 0)

bSoundEnabled=1 (change to 0)

 

not too sure its a audio issue i have run the game fine untill recently, i will try that out though. What is odd is if i leave the town setting and return my fps comes back to normal. when the game stutters it stutters on the menu's as well. so hitting tab and pulling up my menu i get the same results.

[Dilvish]

i have run the game fine untill recently

 

That may be an important clue. What did you change since Oblivion ran fine?

 

If you're overclocking that much, are you monitoring CPU temperature?

 

Try the sound thing too.

 

(I found this tweak on the official forums. I would look at other causes but this will help too)

These .ini settings affect only city cells. These are multipliers that are applied to your view distance slider settings for Actors/Items/Objects, so by lowering them from the default 1.000 that they are at, you can effectively lower draw distance sliders in the cities without affecting your sliders everywhere else in the game. I set mine to 0.5000 for instance - after all, very long view distances are not necessary in the city, but it makes a massive difference in framerates.

 

The .ini settings I'm referring to are these lines:

 

fLODFadeOutActorMultCity=1.0000

fLODFadeOutItemMultCity=1.0000

fLODFadeOutObjectMultCity=1.0000

[Six_inches_shy_of_hung]

i have run the game fine untill recently

 

That may be an important clue. What did you change since Oblivion ran fine?

 

If you're overclocking that much, are you monitoring CPU temperature?

 

Try the sound thing too.

 

(I found this tweak on the official forums. I would look at other causes but this will help too)

These .ini settings affect only city cells. These are multipliers that are applied to your view distance slider settings for Actors/Items/Objects, so by lowering them from the default 1.000 that they are at, you can effectively lower draw distance sliders in the cities without affecting your sliders everywhere else in the game. I set mine to 0.5000 for instance - after all, very long view distances are not necessary in the city, but it makes a massive difference in framerates.

 

The .ini settings I'm referring to are these lines:

 

fLODFadeOutActorMultCity=1.0000

fLODFadeOutItemMultCity=1.0000

fLODFadeOutObjectMultCity=1.0000

 

As for the cpu temp ;) yes i am all over it its very stable and cool at 2.7 ghz i can acheive that oc at only 1.47 v on the core and hit temps of about 30C during the summer when its a bit warmer in the house. im going to give the distance INI tweeks a shot. But what is really bothering me the most is i dont get the slowdown till i have been in town for over 5 mins or so. Its not immediate by any means. And leaving and coming back into town restores my fps for a time as well.

[Guest Tessera]

The overclocking in and of itself may be a factor here. Oblivion is a game that doesn't get along very well with overclocked systems. In fact, it's one of the few games out there that can actually perform worse from overclocking.

 

Try temporarily disabling any overclocking, particularly on your CPU and video card. See if it helps your FPS any in Oblivion.

 

From what you've told us about your system, however, I think I know what the problem might be:

 

One thing that helps enormously with the problems you've been having is to run Oblivion from a pair of SATA harddrives that are setup in a RAID 0 configuration. What may seem like a problem with your video, CPU and other hardware is actually being caused by all of the swapping in and out to disk that occurs in the more "busy" areas of the game (like towns). A solid RAID 0 array alleviates much of this "bottleneck problem" by using a pair of very fast drives working in tandem to quickly shuttle the data in and out of memory. I've personally enjoyed a roughly 40% increase in overall performance (FPS included) by setting up my system this way. I've gone even further, too... by placing Oblivion on its own dedicated partition (to reduce file fragmentation issues) and by setting up Windows XP with dual swapfiles, also located on their own small partitions. Not only does the game run much faster now, but video "stuttering" has almost entirely disappeared as well, which further supports the notion that constant and extensive disk swapping is a huge culprit in Oblivion.

 

So, to sum up my advice:

 

Overclocking = BAD (in Oblivion's case)

Faster SATA RAID 0 array = GOOD

 

I realize this is an expensive solution, if you aren't already setup that way.

[Six_inches_shy_of_hung]

The overclocking in and of itself may be a factor here. Oblivion is a game that doesn't get along very well with overclocked systems. In fact, it's one of the few games out there that can actually perform worse from overclocking.

 

Try temporarily disabling any overclocking, particularly on your CPU and video card. See if it helps your FPS any in Oblivion.

 

From what you've told us about your system, however, I think I know what the problem might be:

 

One thing that helps enormously with the problems you've been having is to run Oblivion from a pair of SATA harddrives that are setup in a RAID 0 configuration. What may seem like a problem with your video, CPU and other hardware is actually being caused by all of the swapping in and out to disk that occurs in the more "busy" areas of the game (like towns). A solid RAID 0 array alleviates much of this "bottleneck problem" by using a pair of very fast drives working in tandem to quickly shuttle the data in and out of memory. I've personally enjoyed a roughly 40% increase in overall performance (FPS included) by setting up my system this way. I've gone even further, too... by placing Oblivion on its own dedicated partition (to reduce file fragmentation issues) and by setting up Windows XP with dual swapfiles, also located on their own small partitions. Not only does the game run much faster now, but video "stuttering" has almost entirely disappeared as well, which further supports the notion that constant and extensive disk swapping is a huge culprit in Oblivion.

 

So, to sum up my advice:

 

Overclocking = BAD (in Oblivion's case)

Faster SATA RAID 0 array = GOOD

 

I realize this is an expensive solution, if you aren't already setup that way.

 

unfortunatly a raid setup is out of the question at the moment, but was in the works. i had read about overclocking being a issue with oblivion, but i really cant see a issue with my 24 hour prime95 stable OC. currently my drive is a maxtor 7200 rpm 200 gig sata suprisingly very fast. This disk swapping issue is interesting, anything off hand i can do while still running my single drive. Also my vid card is unclocked its a evga 7900gtx egs, a second one is already in the works =). So its not the card clocks. thank you all for the replies and the help

[Guest Tessera]

unfortunatly a raid setup is out of the question at the moment, but was in the works. i had read about overclocking being a issue with oblivion, but i really cant see a issue with my 24 hour prime95 stable OC. currently my drive is a maxtor 7200 rpm 200 gig sata suprisingly very fast. This disk swapping issue is interesting, anything off hand i can do while still running my single drive. Also my vid card is unclocked its a evga 7900gtx egs, a second one is already in the works =). So its not the card clocks. thank you all for the replies and the help

 

I know... believe me, I know. Setting up a SATA 0 array is both expensive and time-consuming... installing it, configuring it and transferring all of your data over to the new array can take an afternoon. That's why I had been putting it off, too. I finally just built an entirely new gaming rig from scratch and I just finished setting it up a few days ago.

 

You can see what I came up with HERE if you're curious.

 

It was actually Oblivion that spurred me to build a new machine. I figured this was just the beginning... as I'm sure most high-end 3D games in the future will have similarly enormous system requirements. My new gaming rig runs Oblivion with everything at full-blast and without any problems... but that kind of performance came with a hefty price tag.

 

In your situation, there's a few things you could try, in order to alleviate the problems you've been having. Before I get into them, though, I'll mention that almost all of these "fixes" result in poorer visual quality and other compromises of that nature.

 

You might start off by reading the following excellent article:

 

http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_1.html

 

That's an excellently written guide on various tweaks that you can do to the game.

 

Another quick tweak that works well for Windows XP users is to change a setting here:

 

Control Panel > System > Advanced > Performance > Settings > Advanced > Memory Usage

 

If you have more than 1 Gigabyte of system RAM installed, then change that setting from "Programs" (the default) to "System Cache." Doing so could help you gain a noticeable improvement in loading times during gameplay. This definitely applies to your situation, as what you're experiencing is excessive disk swapping. By devoting more RAM to a larger system cache, your disks will get a small amount of relief and the entire game should speed up slightly. There is no harm in changing this setting... so long as you have more than 1 gig of RAM (2 gigabytes is best).

 

Another thing to check is in your system BIOS. Reboot, go into the BIOS setup menu and look for the settings that control your video bus. If you see anything that says "Spread Spectrum," then DISABLE it. If you see a setting for "Aperture Size," make sure it isn't set any higher than 128 mb.... smaller is better (32 mb is the absolute minimum... lower than that, and most textures won't load). This setting mainly applies to AGP video cards.

 

Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help. There's literally dozens of things that we can try, but read this article first... as it contains most of the best tweaks. 8)

[Six_inches_shy_of_hung]

unfortunatly a raid setup is out of the question at the moment, but was in the works. i had read about overclocking being a issue with oblivion, but i really cant see a issue with my 24 hour prime95 stable OC. currently my drive is a maxtor 7200 rpm 200 gig sata suprisingly very fast. This disk swapping issue is interesting, anything off hand i can do while still running my single drive. Also my vid card is unclocked its a evga 7900gtx egs, a second one is already in the works =). So its not the card clocks. thank you all for the replies and the help

 

I know... believe me, I know. Setting up a SATA 0 array is both expensive and time-consuming... installing it, configuring it and transferring all of your data over to the new array can take an afternoon. That's why I had been putting it off, too. I finally just built an entirely new gaming rig from scratch and I just finished setting it up a few days ago.

 

You can see what I came up with HERE if you're curious.

 

It was actually Oblivion that spurred me to build a new machine. I figured this was just the beginning... as I'm sure most high-end 3D games in the future will have similarly enormous system requirements. My new gaming rig runs Oblivion with everything at full-blast and without any problems... but that kind of performance came with a hefty price tag.

 

In your situation, there's a few things you could try, in order to alleviate the problems you've been having. Before I get into them, though, I'll mention that almost all of these "fixes" result in poorer visual quality and other compromises of that nature.

 

You might start off by reading the following excellent article:

 

http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_1.html

 

That's an excellently written guide on various tweaks that you can do to the game.

 

Another quick tweak that works well for Windows XP users is to change a setting here:

 

Control Panel > System > Advanced > Performance > Settings > Advanced > Memory Usage

 

If you have more than 1 Gigabyte of system RAM installed, then change that setting from "Programs" (the default) to "System Cache." Doing so could help you gain a noticeable improvement in loading times during gameplay. This definitely applies to your situation, as what you're experiencing is excessive disk swapping. By devoting more RAM to a larger system cache, your disks will get a small amount of relief and the entire game should speed up slightly. There is no harm in changing this setting... so long as you have more than 1 gig of RAM (2 gigabytes is best).

 

Another thing to check is in your system BIOS. Reboot, go into the BIOS setup menu and look for the settings that control your video bus. If you see anything that says "Spread Spectrum," then DISABLE it. If you see a setting for "Aperture Size," make sure it isn't set any higher than 128 mb.... smaller is better (32 mb is the absolute minimum... lower than that, and most textures won't load). This setting mainly applies to AGP video cards.

 

Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help. There's literally dozens of things that we can try, but read this article first... as it contains most of the best tweaks. 8)

BTW very nice system im slowly approaching that mark you have attained =P how do you like the gx2, support issues for quad sli and dx10 coming up kept me away, (vista supposedly running dx9 cards in emulation) =( my system cache is already setup that way and optimized i have also already edited my windows registry ;) lil performance tweeks here and there. and yes tweakguides is a Very handy resourse. thanks for the link.

[Guest Tessera]

I'm watching the Vista scene cautiously... as I do with every new release from MicroSloth.

 

I decided not to make any of my hardware decisions based upon the current crop of Vista announcements. I'd rather learn from the goofy past history of MS... and see what it looks like about six months after Vista is finally released in January. What they say today may very well end up being changed in some Service Pack, a few months down the road.