Poor performance on a high end system (very high end for oblivion)

[eleventeen]

Spent the last few days tweaking and modding oblivion trying to get it to run smooth on my system, but it just seems like no matter what I change or do, it just really wants to run poorly.

 

Tried a million tweaks, mods, etc. Most had no real impact on my framerate. Severely dropping the settings can boost it some, but then my card tries less to keep the fpd down (gpu utilization drops to 15-20% when looking at the city, and fps drops to 30-40 - vs easily 300+ indoors, or 60+ in very low detail outdoor areas).

 

System specs:

AMD FX-8350 octa core @4ghz

GTX 670

16gb ram

Fairly fast ssd (oblivion and all the mods are on it)

Asus Xonar DX

Windows 7, though I even went as far as to refresh and tweak up my 8.1 install to try too without much change.

 

So yea... I can run skyrim with 300+ mods installed at 1080p, 4xaa+fxaa, ultra detail at a perfect smooth 60fps.. Oblivion should be a joke for me, yet it runs like garbage.

 

Only notable mod i'm running is morroblivion. Which shouldn't be that intensive, doesn't really have HD textures or even very high poly towns/models.

 

Today I think im making some progress on troubleshooting this:

Updated my MSI afterburner to the latest version, seemed to have some more OSD settings, so I ticed em all.

This let me find out that my GPU is not really trying at all, it's running at 784mhz - like it's in sleep/low power mode (normal gtx 670 runs at 915/980 base/boost and pretty sure mines an OC edition that runs even higher)

 

Thinking the games so old my card doesn't think it's even really an intensive 3D app so its running in low power mode. Though it does this despite changing the nvidia control panel for power mode to performance.. And i think yea even in sleep mode the card could run the game at a solid 60 fps at default settings.. But um yea 1024x768 @ med settings looks really ugly and while I don't care about max detailed (I dont even run shadows or grass because I think they look poor in oblivion), i do want a proper 1080p+aa at least.

 

Think I gotta figure out a way to force it to run at full speed while the games running? Exhausted nearly every other option.

[Surilindur]

The game is old, the engine is old, it does not do much multithreading, stuffing it with mods is a bad idea and so on. Utilities like Oblivion Stutter Remover and Oblivion Reloaded can help, but the game itself is the greatest limit. 30 fps looks very smooth in my opinion and with a modded Oblivion it is quite the achievement. The game is old, and it can only take so much. And anyway, does it really make that much of a difference to see 30, 60 or 300 frames per second? There must be a limit to how many frames human eye can see. Videos usually have 25 fps, I think, or at least the ones I have edited have had. They were filmed with a camera, though, so I do not know if it is a standard or not - probably not.

 

Unless you have a 60+ Hz monitor, there will only ever be a maximum of 60 frames shown to you a second.

 

I do not use Morroblivion myself, so I do not know how much it affects performance. But I doubt it does anything to performance.

 

Edit: Come to think of it, it does make a difference to see 30 or 60 frames a second. I have capped it to 30 in Oblivion and 40 in Skyrim, so I seem to forget about it. :)

Edited June 23, 2015 by PhilippePetain

[eleventeen]

Yea gaming at 30 fps is fine.

I'm just a spoiled pc gamer . Back in the console n64/ps1/2 days i enjoyed tons of games, and nearly all of them were locked to 30 fps and i was content with that.

 

But once you start playing every game at a solid smooth 60 fps, its just so hard to go back. You, and anyone can definitely tell a difference, especially after playing for a while. (and yea i regular lcd like 99% of ppl, so 60hz max) It's especially jarring when in a game like oblivion that runs at perfect 60FPS in indoors, and most outdoor areas, yet drops to 30fps in cities. (and an unstable jerky 30fps that jumps around a lot)

 

Movies or anything pre rendered is different, because when your not in control - your mind doesn't expect movement or response to your actions, and when it comes unexpected, you won't notice if its not as fluid. Your more relaxed, so your eyes relax and thus, work more slowly.

 

Oblivion actually can use all 8 of my cpu cores, after some tweaks it uses about 50% of 1 and 2, and little bit of each other one. Don't think there's any cpu limits going on here, just that it doesn't leverage my gpu properly.

 

Was considering just capping oblivion to 30 or 40, adding more fancy stuff like an enb and giving up the struggle.. But did some more tweaks and figured out how to force performance mode on my gpu and now managing 45-50fps in the worst areas, so almost to my smooth 60fps goal =) (And my gpu is sitll doing it at like 20-30% usage outdoors lol)

 

and re: Stutter remover Im using, and tried all sorts of settings, nothing really seems to have any impact on my fps, just some stuff causes crashes is all i notice. (tho the fast exit fixes crashes)

oblivion reloaded I tried, but it caused tons of crashes and is very unfriendly to a tweaked game, really demands fully default settings to even work. After I finally got it to work, it just reduced my fps about 5-10, so was a waste of time.

oddly its happy to go to 70% and 300+ fps indoors, so its like the higher poly count or lack of occlusion just causes it to not to want to do much work.

[Surilindur]

Probably something in the engine and lack of occlusion culling with planes like in Skyrim. Or something else. I have gotten a bit excited about mods, and having played with them for quite some time, I cannot go back now. But there is always the price to pay for it. :D

 

Luckily, the game now usually runs around 30 fps outdoors (I have capped i here and use framerate manager of OR to keep it close to it instead of too much below it). Not counting drops to 20 or lower because "in" cities (due to Open Cities Reborn and a heap of other mods), the game runs acceptably now. Also RAEVWD might be the greatest culprit behind lower fps. I tried removing all other mods, but my fps did not change much. Maybe 2 fps. Turning off AF (16x) gave also maybe 2 fps. Uninstalling RAEVWD gave maybe 10 or more (I cannot remember, but it was a lot) fps. But I just cannot let go of it. And I have not yet managed to make the ramdisk LOD stuff feature of OR work (admittedly, I have not even tried much). :(

 

Which tweaks have you tried to improve multithreading? I have an i3-2120 (2 physical cores, but with 4... threads?) running at 3.3Ghz and I have only ever managed to make it use 100% of the first one, something like 20% of the second and 0% of the rest two... not sure if it possible to make is use more, but it should not hurt to try. Or maybe it does. Difficult to say.

 

But yes, having played with an acceptable fps for a while, it is difficult to go back. I first bought Skyrim on PS3 and it felt incredible after Oblivion. But when I finally bought it on PC and played on it, PS3 felt terrible and laggy, resolution looked pretty low (could be the TV, too), loading screens took ages, the whole console froze every now and then and the game was full of bugs because I could use the USKP on a console. :( But then again, I do play Assassin's Creed Revelations on PS3 (which runs fine, in my opinion) because I have Brotherhood on PC and me playing it with keyboard is a far greater thread to Ezio than the Borgias. :tongue: