Poor Performance in Imperial City (w/ decent comp)

[Alen1124]

Hello all,

 

So, I started playing Oblivion just a few days ago, installed a ton of mods (OOO, QTP, All natural, etc etc) and much to my surprise was getting very poor FPS (15-20 FPS) in Imperial City. So I decided to reinstall Oblivion with no mods to see the difference and it ended up being the same! 20 FPS in IC with no mods!

 

Here is my comp -

 

4 GB DDR2

955 @ 3.4Ghz

GTX 570 (EVGA SC)

Win 7

 

Keep in mind I'm playing @ 1080P with everything on/max but no AA. Also, while out in the 'wilderness' the FPS stays pretty much rock solid at all times. I've tried disabling sound, setting affinity to 2 cores but as soon as I walk into IC its terrible no matter what. Any idea what the problem could be or is this actually normal?

 

Edit - Literally no difference in FPS if I lower the resolution to 720p. Still ~ 20 fps in Market District.

- Same results when I uncheck all Distant Rendering.

Edited March 3, 2011 by Alen1124

[Striker879]

The Oblivion game engine is old and doesn't take advantage of modern CPUs and video cards (e.g. ... the Havok physics can't be offloaded to the GPU). The game is also quest driven so a lot of processing is taking place each frame or every 5 seconds depending on it's priority. When you're outdoors there are far fewer NPCs to process. You go into the IC and the count skyrockets.

 

Excerpted from the Construction Set Wiki A Beginners Guide - Appendix 2

 

How often scripts are processed

Quest scripts:

These are processed every 5 seconds (by default) when the quest is running.

You can change how often quest scripts are processed by changing a default variable in the quest's script. (See later.)

Scripts on actors(Creatures and NPC's):

These are processed every time the actor's AI is processed. In high process (the loaded area around the player), this is every frame.

When the actor is not in high, this is much less often (down to once every 15 minutes of game time at the lowest process level). But these are still the only scripts (aside from quest scripts) that are processed when the player is not around.

Scripts on references:

These are processed every frame when its cell is loaded, and not at all when the cell is not loaded. So these scripts run only when the player is nearby (which means these are often a good place to put relatively expensive scripts, doing things like distance checks).

Scripts on objects in containers:

These are processed when the container's script is processed -- so, items on actors are processed when the actor is processed. Items in other containers are processed every frame when the cell is loaded.

Scripts on doors:

A bit of a special case, these scripts are processed like other scripts on references (every frame when loaded), but they will also be processed once any time an actor activates the door.

 

If the game engine could take advantage of multi-core CPUs we'd see better performance. There are mods that improve performance and, as you're finding, quite a few that tax the system.

[Alen1124]

Well, thats disappointing.