Trouble Shooting Oblivion Framerate Issues~

[NArroo]

Well, I installed some mods, booted up the game, and found that my framerate was determined to stay in the teens.

 

I have a fairly new computer, it's no slouch. I play Portal on Max-ish settings, new games on higher settings, etc. My computer can handle Vanilla Oblivion excellently, so it must be the mods.

 

So, I start playing with the mods, uninstalling most of them, except FCOM. No matter what I do, including reducing settings both in-game AND on my graphics card (ATi Tools), I can't get a good framerate when I'm not staring at a wall. If there are people around and/or I'm looking down a hall, instant teens, tearing when turning, slide-showing, etc.

So, I decided to take a more quantitative approach!

 

First off, I decided to try out the Console's debugging functions and use the tdt command to see how much of my GPU's 512Mb was being used.

Secondly, I used ATi Tools to tell me, in addition to my framerate, what my CPU usage percentage was.

 

The results?

GPU: Only 110Mb of my card's 512Mb was being used. It was not textures causing the issues.

CPU: Varied wildly between 60% and 80%, occasionally hitting 50%. So it's not scripts....

 

The only two things I can guess are:

A: My GPU is having rendering issues. I doubt this.... My GPU can handle more intensive things that oblivion, It's a 2009 card, I think. Plays everything else fine, including the Half Life 2 games, and high/highest settings. Heck, it gets much hotter running Half-Life 2 (Lap-Top, and no- It's not a crummy retail laptop, so don't even think it.) than it does running oblivion....

B: Streamline, perhaps? I've never had issues before, but I suppose it's worth checking out.

 

What are your guys' thoughts on this?

[MotoSxorpio]

Oblivion's AI system is the most CPU intensive operations in the game. Things you could do to improve performance include: ALL Official Patches, ALL the Unofficial Patches that are relevant, ALL the Unofficial Supplementals patches. That should bring in a few frames. Turn off Self-Shadowing, its borky to begin with and not very pretty in most ppl's opinion. Get Oblivion Stutter Remover (4.1.26 RC version) and use either OBMM and/or Wrye Bash to manage your mods. With only 512 mb, you might stay away from large texture mods for landscape (QTP3, etc).

[NArroo]

Well, I already am using the patches and Performance mods.

[NArroo]

Well, walking through narrow corridors naturally gives me great FPSes. Heck, going outside will often times give me decent, though erratic, FPSs. (For instance, 10 seconds of 32FPS or more...look the wrong way, and UGH 15FPS out of nowhere.) On the other hand, a large room in a ruin? Death!

 

Furthermore, when I say changing graphical options doesn't help, I mean it. Going from HDR to 4x AA, to no AA and no bloom, plus lowing view distances, shadows, streamline fog effects, ect, has a surprisingly little effect on the framerate dips due to large rooms, or many enemies. Also, the enemy thing is really a secondary thing, more like icing on the cake then anything else. I get massive dips from looking the wrong way in empty areas. Hmm, the game doesn't recognize my GPU. Is it possible it's a driver issue?

[MotoSxorpio]

You could lower your

uGridsToLoad=5

uGridDistantCountCity=3

uGridDistantCount=5

uGridDistantTreeRangeCity=3

uGridDistantTreeRange=10

[NArroo]

You could lower your

uGridsToLoad=5

uGridDistantCountCity=3

uGridDistantCount=5

uGridDistantTreeRangeCity=3

uGridDistantTreeRange=10

 

What is a grid to load anyways?

 

What happens when I'm in a dungeon?

[Poulscath]

Oblivion can hammer your harddrive and system memory more than most games, especially with big texture mods. I'd check those out too.

[MichikoUnknownFox]

Keep your uGridsToLoad at 5. Raising it will cause significant FPS drops for most people, and dropping it to the next lower valid value (3) messes with visuals. The worst I've seen is seeing the LOD-type textures for nearby buildings and ground (the blurry meant-for-long-distance-viewing type). For the most part you don't have to touch this because your system has enough RAM and VRAM.

 

This is my understanding of it. To put it simply, "grids" are areas, and the grids to load options will count how many grids around your current area will be loaded into memory. If I'm not mistaken, this is what sets whether to render the LOD version of the meshes (for example, buildings or trees), and being the actual renditions of what you would see if you were near them. Supposedly, higher values gives you better ranges at which it loads the full meshes and textures rather than the LOD versions.

 

They say that if you have more than 2 GB of RAM, you can raise uGridsToLoad all the way up to 11, but I tried it with my 3 GB RAM machine, and didn't see a significant boost in graphics or performance. If anything, I kinda lost some FPS and increased stuttering. Keep it at 5 for balance.

[MotoSxorpio]

uGridsToLoad is how many grids (cells) are loaded at one time. The other Grid entries are what is rendered at one time. Keeping uGridsToLoad at 5 is a good idea; Adjust the other entries lower for less objects rendered, more fps.

[NArroo]

First off: It's not anything like textures. Adding in texture mods, removing them, changing graphic settings, DID NOT HELP. Heck, I put the game on it's lowest settings, and I could still get my game into the teens just by standing still and looking at a large room. I think I got...and extra 5 frames though. Graphical settings are obviously not the problem. Any ways, I decided to boot up the game with no mods, besides OBSE plugins, and guess what? The problem vanished. The thing is, I already tried with most of my mods off anyways, including the graphical mods. So...hmmm...anyways, I just tried with most of the FCOM basics on, and it's fine. I suspect that an individual mod, or perhaps two or three working in tandem, are responsible. Hoo boy.

 

Also, when I make my bashed patch, what should I be importing? Everything I can? I that case, should I also be merging mods I'm importing?