The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - stutter/lag on modern system

[darko1nexus]

Hey there!

 

 

I'm having some issues regarding The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

The game is constantly stuttering/lagging despite me having hardware that's more than capable of running the game near, if not on max settings. (At least according to the official system requirements)

 

I have a Asus notebook with these specs:

 

Intel Core i5-5200U - 2.20 GHz

 

4 GB RAM

 

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950M - 2 GB

 

Windows 10 (64 bit)

 

Does anyone have any clues as to why this stuttering/lagging occurs?

I had a much weaker PC just a year ago and it was able to squeeze more fps out of Oblivion than this notebook, so I'm quite clueless.

 

 

Cheers!

Edited July 19, 2016 by darko1nexus

[KornelTheGamer]

optimization issues for the current hardware, back in 2006 people didn't expect PCs 3 times stronger than 2000$ PCs at the time, so the game is a bit overwhelmed with the numbers

 

from my limited experience with older games on strong hardware from 2 years ago, seems like frame limiters like to bugger everything up

 

take my info with a pile of salt on top as i don't know much about the way oblivion works, all i know is that it's a fun game that worked on my sempron potato

[Vagrant0]

optimization issues for the current hardware, back in 2006 people didn't expect PCs 3 times stronger than 2000$ PCs at the time, so the game is a bit overwhelmed with the numbers

 

Not exactly true, but close.

 

The thing is that Oblivion will only run on a single core. So while you might have 2.2ghz total system processing power, this is being divided between the number of cores you have. You can get around this slightly by going into task manager while the game is open and changing the affinity to not use the first core (usually used by the OS and other older applications), In some cases, this will make older games run slightly faster since they will default to the second core which is usually under less continual load.

 

Although Oblivion can only use 4gb of memory, and this was typical back then, windows itself uses nearly half that.

 

Although you have a GTX 950 card... You are still using a laptop. Videocards in laptops usually perform at much lower specs than advertised due to power management, heat, and form factor issues.

 

 

Best advice I can give is to take a good look at the sort of "lag" you are experiencing. If you are just seeing framerate issues, changing your lighting (turn off shadows/reflections) or rendering method (changing from hardware to software rendering) might help give you more frames. However, in underpowered systems, Oblivion can also experience processing lag. With processing lag, you can still have a high framerate, but the way the game (particularly NPCs) behaves feels like they are delayed. If fighting something like a rat or a mountain lion, you can sidestep right before they lunge or attack without them turning towards you as you do it. Or, you can run to one point, bandits will head to you, and while you're moving to another point on level terrain, they will still head to the place you were. In more extreme cases, NPC head tracking will be significantly delayed.

[KornelTheGamer]

 

optimization issues for the current hardware, back in 2006 people didn't expect PCs 3 times stronger than 2000$ PCs at the time, so the game is a bit overwhelmed with the numbers

 

Not exactly true, but close.

 

The thing is that Oblivion will only run on a single core. So while you might have 2.2ghz total system processing power, this is being divided between the number of cores you have. You can get around this slightly by going into task manager while the game is open and changing the affinity to not use the first core (usually used by the OS and other older applications), In some cases, this will make older games run slightly faster since they will default to the second core which is usually under less continual load.

 

Although Oblivion can only use 4gb of memory, and this was typical back then, windows itself uses nearly half that.

 

Although you have a GTX 950 card... You are still using a laptop. Videocards in laptops usually perform at much lower specs than advertised due to power management, heat, and form factor issues.

 

 

Best advice I can give is to take a good look at the sort of "lag" you are experiencing. If you are just seeing framerate issues, changing your lighting (turn off shadows/reflections) or rendering method (changing from hardware to software rendering) might help give you more frames. However, in underpowered systems, Oblivion can also experience processing lag. With processing lag, you can still have a high framerate, but the way the game (particularly NPCs) behaves feels like they are delayed. If fighting something like a rat or a mountain lion, you can sidestep right before they lunge or attack without them turning towards you as you do it. Or, you can run to one point, bandits will head to you, and while you're moving to another point on level terrain, they will still head to the place you were. In more extreme cases, NPC head tracking will be significantly delayed.

 

thank you for correcting me

[ElderScrollsFan001]

I started to have this same issue after having to reinstall oblivion after having to reinstall my OS. Turn out it is ,in my case, it seems be related rundlll32 running the back ground because window 7 Game Explorer try to find info about the games online. When rundlll32 was running and I had the internet turn off it would use up 100% of the CPU and keep looping. If I turn on the net rundll32 would come on, do it's thing, and quit and my game runs fine.

 

 

I found a little bit that talks about it here

 

http://www.gamesas.com/error-obse-cannot-inject-dll-t19885.html

 

Now here's a kicker I went to turn off Game Explorer options telling it not to look up game info and updates, then I uninstalled oblivion and obse, also I deleted the registry item suggested in the link, after which i cleaned my reg with ccleaner and restarted my computer.

 

After the restart I reinstalled oblivion and obse and it ran with out running rundll32 it was the smoothest and most stable my game ever ran.......

 

Then I realized I forgot to tell OBSE loader to run with admin privileges as I want to mod something. Doing this caused Game Explorer/ rundll32 to starting running again so now I really don't know what to do as it make oblivion very unplayable now.

Edited August 12, 2016 by ElderScrollsFan001

[Surilindur]

I am not sure how acceptable this way of going about disabling game explorer stuff is, but if you have a version of Windows that has the group policy editor, you could try disabling the game explorer stuff there to see if it helps. Search for "gpedit.msc" using the start menu or the search bar (if using Win 10), open "gpedit", navigate to "Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Game Explorer" and set the relevant "Turn off <something>" options to Enabled. Here is a small image:

 

 

http://i.imgur.com/o6WVBem.jpg

 

 

THAT IS JUST AN IDEA, if you break something, I am not responsible! It is just an idea (might be a dumb one) in case all else fails. I have not had the Game Explorer interfere myself, so I cannot think of anything else at the moment.

 

Edit: Or is that what you already did when you told it "not to look for updates" and all that... ?

Edited August 13, 2016 by Contrathetix

[ElderScrollsFan001]

I have win 7 I was going to get win10 but it would have be too much for my system

I can't find the options you pointed out

 

In win7 you can open up Game Explorer and turn all that off, but apparent it's bug and doesn't actually turn it off with older games from what i been reading........unless obse use it.

[forli]

@Vagrant0:

Stop saying Oblivion only run on a single core. Oblivion doesn't take full advantages of multi-core CPU, but it's still a multi-thread application.

The havok engine can run on 1 to 6 threads (Oblivion.ini->iNumHavokThreads), the script engine run on its own thread and OBSE plugins can create new threads to run their stuff (like EMC does).

 

The real problem is the script engine: as I said, it runs on its own thread... only one. All scripts run sequentially (no concurrency exists) and since Bethesda didn't optimized the script engine very much, running heavy scripts (from mods of course, as vanilla scripts are very light) may severely slow down the script thread, and so the core running that thread.

 

Even if the other threads finish rendering all graphic, effects, etc... the game still has to wait for the script thread to finish the current "frame", which could end later, so the game can run less frame per second (FPS decrease) and stutters may happen (if specific frame takes much more time than the other).

 

 

 

Back to the problem: because of the script engine bottleneck, you can have a powerful CPU, but if you have many mods with heavy (and worse: poorly optimized) scripts, they could cripple your FPS more than a fully modded Skyrim.

I suggest you check your mods and the scripts they run.

[AdamRundolf001]

HURRY UP SKYBLIVION!!! God dangit I hate lag PERIOD! One of the main reasons why I switched to skyrim is because it is optimized better and even more so with the Special Edition. Also I don't want to hear this: "Oh you can't port over the mods!" Skyrim already has mods like better music system, deadly reflex and realistic leveling already implemented. There's also probably going to be mod support as usual so I wouldn't worry about that.

[TheMastersSon]

"The game is constantly stuttering/lagging despite me having hardware that's more than capable of running the game near, if not on max settings. (At least according to the official system requirements)"

 

Oblivion's system requirements don't give specs for max settings (or resolution), and regardless of the # of cores a 2.2GHz cpu isn't fast enough to play the game with anything close to max resolution/settings without stuttering. As for overall lag, if you haven't already, check Nvidia's profile for Oblivion and set the "Max frames to render ahead" from its default to 1 (0 also works, but response time is _too_ fast for many people at that setting). :smile:

 

EDIT: Also, according to Oblivion's readme file, shipped with the game in 2006, minimum cpu speed is 2.0GHz and recommended is 3.0GHz. From our testing you'll need 4GHz to handle the game with hi-res textures, heavy mods etc.

Edited November 22, 2016 by TheMastersSon