I cannot max oblivion out.

[dmxdex2020]

I have a core i7 at 3.2 and a geforce 470. If i max oblivion out looking at certain area's my framerate can did into the 20s from 60fps. It normally dips into 40s and 30s though. If i turn of things like distant trees and buildings, lower indoor and outdoor shadows my framefrate stays closer to 60fps. This game is 5 years old surely my hardware should be able to max this game out no problems.

 

This is the vanilla game also no mods as i am testing.

[HeyYou]

Then you have other things going on that are eating up your performance. Background tasks are a big one here. Even though you may have a billy bad arse processor, oblivion only makes efficient use of one core..... now, if that core is also doing a bunch of other stuff..... then that is performance that oblivion can't use. So, one way to pick up a few frames is, streamlining your system, turn off processes you don't need, (be it "ever" or "just at the moment"....) There are some utilities that will do this for you, and there are also some really good system tweaking guides available as well. (I like Blackvipers site.)

 

Another consideration is: Sound Processing. With the advent of Vista, directsound ceased to exist, and all such calls were then forced to be dealt with by the CPU..... rendering folks expensive hardware accelerated sound cards, to little better than onboard sound. Now though, there are apps that can alter that behavior, by intercepting the directsound calls, and converting them to OpenAL instead, and your expensive sound card again becomes useful.

 

So, just as an experiment, find the setting, in your oblvion.ini, located in My Games\Oblivion:

 

bmusicenabled=1

 

Change the 1 to a zero, and try the game again, see what kind of performance gain you pick up.

[dmxdex2020]

How would turning off music give me a gain?

[HeyYou]

The processor would no longer have to deal with it, as it more'n likely does now. Give it a shot, see what happens.

[dmxdex2020]

It did not do anything. Im walking around at 60fps maxed and and then maybe some people on screen or looking in a certain direction my framerate dips into 40s or 30s. Its always been the same since this game came out for me and i refuse to beleive anyone who says they dont get frame drops in oblivion. I think the game just has poor coding or engine.

 

The only way to help with the framerate dropping is to lower settings. I didnt buy a rig like the one i have to turn settings down especially on a 5 year old game.

Edited May 24, 2011 by dmxdex2020

[HeyYou]

In reality, anything over about 15 is playable. I have a Phenom II X4 965 black...... a 4890 vid card, 4 gb RAM, and a real, hardware accelerated soundcard. (I run XP Pro 64 bit...) I am pegged at 60FPS in interiors, regardless of how many NPC's are around, Occasionally dipping into the 50's.... Outdoors, it drops down to around 20 in NPC heavy areas like the IC waterfront. I also run QTP3, RAEVWD, and a few other texture replacers...... I think the difference between us, aside from the sound card, is that I have my machine HIGHLY streamlined, and there is zero crap running in the background that I don't absolutely require for windows to be fully functional. After a fresh boot, my page file usage is right around 230 meg, with 17 processes running......

 

Granted, Win7/Vista are dramatic changes from the way things work in XP..... so, I seriously doubt you will ever be able to trim your machine to the same level.... but, there is some stuff that you can turn off, that WILL get you some performance gain, in games, at the expense of some other stuff being slower. (starting programs, and searching your drives....) Killing whatever passes for the indexing service, and superfetch, should net you some gains, and I am sure there is other stuff you can kill of, that you don't really need......

 

Also, I don't run ANY flavor of anti-malware on my machine. I have a hardware firewall that deals with that kind of thing for me. (besides, anti-virus scanners and such really aren't as much protection as the folks that write them would have you believe.) Some of them, Norton Internet security, for instance, are absolute resource HOGS.... and will drag even the best machines to their knees, when you start running high CPU demand apps, such as oblivion.

 

You are correct though, in your assertion that oblivion is poorly optimized...... In all reality, I don't think it was optimized at all... It doesn't take advantage of multicore processors, the rendering engine is piss poor, as it renders EVERYTHING in your line of site, whether you can see it, or not...... even that one small change would RADICALLY improve the games performance outside......

[MichikoUnknownFox]

lol Don't worry about maxing it out. Like HeyYou said, Oblivion is terrible when it comes to graphics optimization. It's not a good benchmark for computer specs. Just aim for as stable and playable an FPS as you can get and stick with that. If it stutters, then you have a problem but you can probably fix it. It's unlikely that your system would stutter though. Heck, mine's only a fraction of your system's power and I'm not really getting any stuttering.

 

I used to play on a really old machine that was not at all built for gaming (Radeon HD X1550 card lol), and played at a fairly stable 15-20 FPS. It was fine with low settings. Fast-paced combat, etc. It just stuttered once in a while especially outdoors. But overall I would still say it was playable. I enjoyed playing on that machine for 4 years until I got this machine, which is better for games but not really a gaming machine (it's more optimized for my work). But yeah, be happy that you even get to 60 FPS at all lol. A lot of people don't.

[dmxdex2020]

In reality, anything over about 15 is playable. I have a Phenom II X4 965 black...... a 4890 vid card, 4 gb RAM, and a real, hardware accelerated soundcard. (I run XP Pro 64 bit...) I am pegged at 60FPS in interiors, regardless of how many NPC's are around, Occasionally dipping into the 50's.... Outdoors, it drops down to around 20 in NPC heavy areas like the IC waterfront. I also run QTP3, RAEVWD, and a few other texture replacers...... I think the difference between us, aside from the sound card, is that I have my machine HIGHLY streamlined, and there is zero crap running in the background that I don't absolutely require for windows to be fully functional. After a fresh boot, my page file usage is right around 230 meg, with 17 processes running......

 

Granted, Win7/Vista are dramatic changes from the way things work in XP..... so, I seriously doubt you will ever be able to trim your machine to the same level.... but, there is some stuff that you can turn off, that WILL get you some performance gain, in games, at the expense of some other stuff being slower. (starting programs, and searching your drives....) Killing whatever passes for the indexing service, and superfetch, should net you some gains, and I am sure there is other stuff you can kill of, that you don't really need......

 

Also, I don't run ANY flavor of anti-malware on my machine. I have a hardware firewall that deals with that kind of thing for me. (besides, anti-virus scanners and such really aren't as much protection as the folks that write them would have you believe.) Some of them, Norton Internet security, for instance, are absolute resource HOGS.... and will drag even the best machines to their knees, when you start running high CPU demand apps, such as oblivion.

 

You are correct though, in your assertion that oblivion is poorly optimized...... In all reality, I don't think it was optimized at all... It doesn't take advantage of multicore processors, the rendering engine is piss poor, as it renders EVERYTHING in your line of site, whether you can see it, or not...... even that one small change would RADICALLY improve the games performance outside......

 

 

Well i dont like drops from 60fps i notice it on my monitor. Im getting a 120hz monitor soon so hopefully things will look smoother. I will take what i get though. Im going to just stick with fallout 3 as that runs a lot better on my hardware and with the stutter remover pretty much rids the game of the microstutter. The only stutter i get is when i have a few mods running. I need an SSD to get rid of certain framerate drops and loading random area's that is what i was told by NMC who made the best texture pack for fallout 3. When you look at certain area's of oblivion and fallout 3 framerate just plummets for no reason.

Edited May 24, 2011 by dmxdex2020

[MarkInMKUK]

Changing your monitor to a 120Hz one won't make any difference if the game itself isn't producing frames that often.

 

The two recommendations missing from the above as far as I can see are

 

(1) defrag the drive completely (I use 'Defraggler' on a daily basis) and

 

(2) check your antivirus isn't doing an "on file access" scan on the Oblivion and OBSE processs - as they both open dozens of data file this can cause major stutter when hitting a new area or anyplace where activity or animation changes for some reason (switching to combat for instance involves several animation files being opened (and scanned), plus music files opened (and scanned), plus any sound effect files opened (and scanned) - if you are fighting more than one opponent it involves a LOT of scanning).

 

Finally, as it's Windows 7:

 

(3) stick a fast pen drive into a slot and use it for Readyboost - that may well help.

 

(4) Try the 3GB memory patch, as vanilla Oblivion doesn't actually USE memory very well - you may find it makes an improvement.

Edited May 25, 2011 by MarkInMKUK

[dmxdex2020]

Changing your monitor to a 120Hz one won't make any difference if the game itself isn't producing frames that often.

 

The two recommendations missing from the above as far as I can see are

 

(1) defrag the drive completely (I use 'Defraggler' on a daily basis) and

 

(2) check your antivirus isn't doing an "on file access" scan on the Oblivion and OBSE processs - as they both open dozens of data file this can cause major stutter when hitting a new area or anyplace where activity or animation changes for some reason (switching to combat for instance involves several animation files being opened (and scanned), plus music files opened (and scanned), plus any sound effect files opened (and scanned) - if you are fighting more than one opponent it involves a LOT of scanning).

 

Finally, as it's Windows 7:

 

(3) stick a fast pen drive into a slot and use it for Readyboost - that may well help.

 

(4) Try the 3GB memory patch, as vanilla Oblivion doesn't actually USE memory very well - you may find it makes an improvement.

 

 

Changing my monitor is not for my frames per second its for the terrible screen tear oblivion gets also the fact if my game does dip below 50 fps my screen wont look as slow and will look smoother.

 

I also tried streamline which is not very good.

Edited May 25, 2011 by dmxdex2020