Lag apparently caused by faces/heads...

[Nysba]

K, so I have some big mods like Bananasplit Better Cities and Qarl's Texture Pack (well, that's uninstalled atm but that's not the point) and everything seems to be running just fine without any major lag, except when I'm around many NPCs. Pretty annoying. So I decided I'd see how much of an improvement I get from deleting the NPCs with the console. The difference was huge.

I started looking for any mods that might lower the amount of NPCs or something, with no success. I stumbled across the good old Oblivion Tweak Guide on tweakguides.com and figured I might as well read through it to see if I find anything that could help me.

I think it was the part about self shadowing that got me to try this...

It said the self shadowing can be a very big performance hit. So I tried disabling it but it didn't do anything, really. Then I figured "Hey, maybe it's the NPCs' faces that's causing the lag. (I remember reading something about facegen being laggy on New Vegas and thought maybe it's the same in Oblivion) I started poking around Oblivion.ini because I had seen settings there like "bUseEyenvMapping", "bFixFaceNormals", "bUseFaceGenHeads","bFaceMipMaps" and so on. So I started going through those in order to see if they do anything.

 

Once I got to "bUseFaceGenHeads=1" and changed it to 0, the NPCs' heads disappeared.

But something else happened as well...

bUseFaceGenHeads=1 (the default, obviously)

bUseFaceGenHeads=0

Look at the FPS counter on the top left corner.

 

So now I've been looking around trying to find out why this is happening and how I can have the same FPS as without heads without actually taking out the heads. Any ideas?

Edited October 22, 2011 by Nysba

[Canecaneshane]

Is there a way to keep the head but disable the face animations?

[LFact]

Is there a way to keep the head but disable the face animations?

 

Deleting .tri can disable all facial animations. But you don't want to mess with BSA files.

[Mortrix927]

There are a couple mods that will limit the number of NPC's in a given cell at a time. If you have Wrye Bash, there is a tweak you can use as well.

[MotoSxorpio]

"bUseEyenvMapping"=reflections in eyes and smooth/shiney surfaces, I leave this on cuz its perdy. But if you have serious lag, try turning this off as every set of eyeballs has a reflection that must be rendered with it on.

 

"bFixFaceNormals"=game tries to fix aging by manipulating the face configuration...you should leave this disabled.

 

"bFaceMipMaps"=lets the engine use mip mapping to shade the face textures for aging realism...also, you should leave this disabled. Most Texture packs make better faces than these last two settings can do.