Serious FPS issue (something very wrong here)

[ShadowArchon]

I just went back to an older box (current pc died) and I'm having some serious trouble with my framerates.

Specs:

Pentium 4 Prescott @ 3ghz

Intel i915 Motherboard (Dell)

2gb cas 4 6400 DDR2

MSI G92 8800 GTS 512 (175.16 driver)

SATA-300 HDD

Win XP sp2 DX9.0c Feb 2010 update

I get about 10 fps on the Waterfront while looking at an NPC if they take up most of the view. General waterfront moving around is between 10-16 fps. On normal wilderness with no buildings etc I get 15-20. My system should do better than this from what I remember last time I used it. Even more annoying is I can go from absolute minimum settings/resolution to maximum/resolution and there is no difference in performance at all with the exception of turning off water reflections which nets me about 10 fps; and turning off distant land which gets me to 30-35 fps in the wilderness but still 10 fps in the waterfront. If anybody has any ideas I'd appreciate the help, if you need more information just let me know what.

Thanks,

Jack.

 

EDIT: oh yeah Oblivion with SI last patch. 1.2.0416

Edited September 14, 2011 by ShadowArchon

[bben46]

First, when you went to the backup computer did you do anything to optimize it for gaming - such as defragging and limiting the background processes? Did you copy files instead of installing them? Can make a big difference) Especially if you copy the Oblivion.ini from one computer to another.

 

What about sound? running Oblivion with a integrated sound system instead of a separate card can slow things down. Try turning the sounds OFF in the Oblivion.ini (Not just turning the volume down)

 

Not sure about that video system. Is it integrated into the motherboard?

 

An integrated video will share system RAM with the program, so if your integrated video uses 512g RAM that leaves 1.5g for anything else, including the Operating System and every background process - leaving less than 1g for the game.

 

Here are my Slow Game suggestions

http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/Fixing_a_slow_game

[HeyYou]

8800GTS is actually a decent vid card. (for it's day, it was pretty much top of the line.)

 

I agree with BBen though on the system optimization. With a single core processor, you REALLY need to take some pretty dramatic steps to get acceptable performance. If you are using any texture packs, LOD mods, or other things of that nature, yeah, that's gonna KILL your framerate.

[ShadowArchon]

Well it's not mods or my sound card. I get the exact same results with all my mods loaded as I did on the clean install with only the DLC's & SI. The sound is integrated (no open slot for a sound card because of the double height vid card) but the first thing I tried was disabling music and sound in the ini and that made no difference, not even a single fps. As to the system setup its a new tweaked XP install, grand total of 17 running processes, just the system critical ones left, consuming less than 200mb of ram and 0% cpu. Fresh oblivion install from the DVD.

 

That's odd that you mention the single core though, most people say Oblivion doesn't multi-thread very well so it's the clock rate that matters not the number of cores.

[HeyYou]

its also processor architecture, and L2 cache. (on the older ones... now its L3 cache..... go figure.)

 

Even so... with your specs, you should be able to do better than that, and turning off music should have given you a nice little bump in performance. You system sounds like it is about as tweaked as it can get.... (which is the exact same thing I did when running on similar hardware.....)

 

There isn't some flavor of power management going on that is throttling back the CPU is there?

[ShadowArchon]

Nah, I always disable all forms of power management, bios, windows, hardware last time one of my computers throttled back the power was when the power went out. :) I've been fiddling with it all morning and I'm thinking it must be video drivers, problem with that is that NO other nvidia driver I've found will work with my card other than the MSI ones. Not sure why, MSI must have changed some hardware id that prevents them from working. Though why they'd do that is beyond me; it wouldn't be the first time I'd seen it. Sadly these drivers work PERFECT with every other game I have.

 

On a related side note I tried doing the trick to enable 3.0 shader support (edit the ini & rename shader 19 to the package listed in renderer info) and all I got for my trouble was a black sky. Tried looking that one up but all I kept getting from google was results related to the BSOD that plagues NVIDIA cards. Sigh. Still that leads me to believe that either there's problem between Oblivion and my card because I know the 8800 series supports 3.0 shaders. The game also doesn't recognize my card at all, typical.

[HeyYou]

Nah, I always disable all forms of power management, bios, windows, hardware last time one of my computers throttled back the power was when the power went out. :) I've been fiddling with it all morning and I'm thinking it must be video drivers, problem with that is that NO other nvidia driver I've found will work with my card other than the MSI ones. Not sure why, MSI must have changed some hardware id that prevents them from working. Though why they'd do that is beyond me; it wouldn't be the first time I'd seen it. Sadly these drivers work PERFECT with every other game I have.

 

On a related side note I tried doing the trick to enable 3.0 shader support (edit the ini & rename shader 19 to the package listed in renderer info) and all I got for my trouble was a black sky. Tried looking that one up but all I kept getting from google was results related to the BSOD that plagues NVIDIA cards. Sigh. Still that leads me to believe that either there's problem between Oblivion and my card because I know the 8800 series supports 3.0 shaders. The game also doesn't recognize my card at all, typical.

 

Because your card is newer than the game. :D

 

Have you tried any of the older Nvidia drivers from the Nvidia website? Seems kinda strange that MSI wouldn't want you to be able to use them...... (although, not unheard of.....) I think the last driver version I have bookmarked for the nvidia cards, is like 91.23....... Those seemed to work great for Oblivion.... (maybe that was Morrowind....) Doesn't look like MSI has much of anything older than 169 though.... might try giving that a shot, just for giggles.

[ShadowArchon]

Yeah. I'm, as a general rule, one of those untrusting types who doesn't upgrade drivers unless I have to on unified driver models. My belief is that all the tweaking towards whatever is current degrades the performance of older hardware at best. I learned this the hard way after burning up a Hercules 3d Prophet 9700 (which was a sweet card in its day) because ATI made the newer Catalysts push the card harder than it could stand. Normally with NVIDIA I try to stick to the 71.xx to 97.xx range because it suits my hardware and Gaming choices well (Oblivion and Fallout 3 are FAR newer than most other games I like) Sadly they don't function with this card for some reason, wish they did. Who knows why. Driver distribution methods have gotten as stupid as copy protection of late. Some suit in a board room thinks it looks good on paper and off they run with it never understanding one iota how it works in the real world.

[MarkInMKUK]

Have you given the Omega video drivers a shot? I found they worked far better for gaming than the vanilla nVidia ones did. They're well worth a try, anyway.