Sudden FPS Drops And Stutters

[muratguler]

Hi All

 

I have been playing Oblivion for about 230 hours and this is my second time. I have recently had a virus problem and to get rid of this, i scanned my laptop with several antivirus and antispyware programmes. After all these scans, i started to experience sudden fps drops and stutters during playing. I am using Oblivion Stutter Remover 4.1.23208 + Steamline for performance increasing and they were working pretty good before virus scans. With thinking that antivirus programmes i used unintentially erased some of the necessary files of OSR and Steamline, i reinstalled these programmes but nothing changed (maybe some other game files were erased, i don't know). I need your advices to understand and get rid of this problem.

 

Another thing, here in Turkiye, the weather is getting hotter and hotter and the maximum heats of my laptop's cpu and vga increased by 16-17 C comparing with one month ago. Can this be the reason for slowing down and fps drops of my laptop ???

 

I modded the game up to 17 GB and my laptop's gaming performance is 13.700 points at 3DMark05 test.

 

Thanks

[MarkInMKUK]

Check that your main antivirus is not set to "scan all files on access" or similar - Oblivion continually accesses all sorts of files and this can cause major stuttering.

 

I had to exclude the files accessed by the Oblivion and OBSE process to get stuff nice and smooth

[MichikoUnknownFox]

Aside from the antivirus, the heat may also have something to do with it.

 

A hot GPU (or any other computer/electronic part for that matter) really does perform worse than a cold one. That's why cooling systems are important/expensive, and large computers are practically refrigerated. It seems that generally, if your GPU is going above 71°C, it can start to slow down, 75° is a full load (stress tests), some will automatically shut down to protect itself at 81°C or more. My card will start to get a burning plastic smell at 85°C lol, but I've since prevented that from happening.

 

For laptops, you usually only need to use one of those cooling pads (you put your laptop on it and it has powerful fans underneath to take the heat away from the laptop itself).

 

Additionally, stutters can increase if your HD is fragmented (though it might not drop stable FPS levels). Fragmentation happens naturally as you use your HD under normal operation. Running your antivirus programs can cause fragmentation, especially if they actually detect and delete or move some files. Defragment your HD regularly. Most computers will be okay with twice-a-month defragmentation, but I personally like to defragment once a week, just because I can lol.

 

There's a few more computer maintenance stuff that you can do. There's some free utilities that can scan your registry for errors (such as invalid shortcuts and filetypes). Registry errors don't generally affect a game that's already playing, but if you want your laptop to perform well, this can help too. You should also make sure your hard disk isn't too full or cluttered. A full HD is generally slower than an "new" one, or one that doesn't have a lot of programs. You can try keeping your main HD, where you install programs, separate from the HD where you keep other data files (such as downloads, pictures, music, etc.).

 

Lastly (for now), you can make sure that you don't have any unnecessary programs running in the background (antivirus included). Chat programs, download "accelerators", torrent programs and even your web browser (especially if you have a lot of toolbars and plugins), and other things that the average computer user might have running in the background or minimized, eat up a lot of resources, and tend to do so in spikes rather than in a solid steady motion. Turn all of those things off. You can also check your task manager for things you don't need at the moment. If you play other games, especially online games, you may notice programs like punkbuster/pnkbustr or other security programs running in the background too. You can usually just turn those off.

[Netwit2008]

At around the 200 hour mark, you can get a glitch that causes all fires, doors, etc. to suddenly slow down to snail's pace. Fire loses the flicker effect and doors take like 5 full minutes to close. This mod will clear that up. You run it when the anomaly occurs. You can run it each time this happens. I have over 600 hours logged in on my game and have had to use it several times. You can find it here:

 

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=5127

 

I also use this one to optimize performance:

 

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=10510

 

There is a free program called Game Booster that will shut down all your unnecessary processes during gameplay. It works good for me and it was so cheap, I ended up buying it as well:

 

http://game-booster.en.softonic.com/download#pathbar