Actors causing massive FPS drop

[NeroDarkFire]

I'm looking into this problem myself today. Your posts have been useful, thanks.

[Akreontage]

Since you resurrected this topic in 2016 I have to tell you that the issue with actors is related to their faces. The problem is face animations. When there are 5-6+ npcs at once on the screen fps is being cut by half. With my config I can drop to 40~ fps when in the Imperial City. That's a HUUUUUGE fps drop. If you set bUseFaceGenHeads=0 in Oblivion.ini you will turn the heads off and will see DRAMMATIC fps increase in rush hours. Although it's not fun to play without heads it is actually pretty playable with face animations turned off but fps will always be 60+. To do so download BSA Unpacker. Launch it. Press Open. Choose Oblivion\Data\Oblivion - Meshes.bsa. Press Extract All to some folder. Wait until it will finish extraction (1.3~Gb). Go to Oblivion\Data\ and delete Oblivion - Meshes.bsa. Now copy paste those files you extracted into Oblivion\Data folder (this step might break your installed mods, so better start doing this with vanilla Oblivion). Open Oblivion\Data\Meshes\Characters folder. Press ctrl+f and type %.tri. Delete all files with .tri extension you will find. Launch Oblivion and see magical fps improvement near actors. They won't show any expressions nor open their mouths, but that's what we did... Deleted face animations. After that you can install much better looking faces (Oblivion Character Overhaul v 2). Just remember that mod has it's own .tri files so you need to remove them. Just find %.tri files after mod installation and delete them. I myself am going to play oblivion this way right now because I haven't played it for ages. Those face expressions weren't good after all. : )