Oblivion Performance and Stability Guide

[Eferas]

Hello fellow players,

 

I wanted to play Oblivion again with lots of mods for some time now, but every time I reinstall it I end up with a crashing game.

 

Now, I know how to make a stable Skyrim, but I don't know how to make a stable Oblivion. Does anybody know a good guide/tutorial about that? What are the required mods? On google I only found old tutorials, so here I'm asking.

 

Thanks for reading. :)

[bevilex]

Hello,

 

It is harder to have a stable Oblivion than having a stable Skyrim ... because Oblivion's engine is older and doesn't really take advantage of multi-core CPU.

I don't know any guides, but this is what I know :

 

For better stability and performance you can use :

 

- 4GB Patch (allows Oblivion to use more RAM)

- Oblivion Stutter remover

- MoreHeap

- ENBoost (unlike Skyrim, you can't use ENBoost AND ENB graphics together ..)

- Don't use more than 1K retextures (less impact on RAM and VRAM)

- Some mods are performance killer, so you should really think about what mods you really want to use and how they affect performance .. The more mods you will add, the bigger will be the probablity to have a crash and the fps loss. The best method is to add mods one by one, slowly, and to test their impact each times.

- If you want even better perfomance, you can use some tools which optimize textures and meshes (for instance Ordenador and Pyffi)

 

Bevi

Edited August 29, 2016 by bevilex

[Eferas]

Thank you so much, I didn't know MoreHeap and I didn't know that enboost can't be used with enb graphics, maybe that's the reason my Oblivion crashed so badly.

 

What about grass? My only complain about Oblivion graphics is the grass appearing and disappering out of nowhere, do you know a working fix for that? I know about the mod whose name is "grass fix", but I never managed to make it work (or at least I didn't see a difference).

Edited August 29, 2016 by Eferas

[bevilex]

You are welcome.

I forgot to add "Oblivion Reloaded" to the list. Not only it improves graphics, but it can also improve fps (and more).

 

Concerning the grass problem ... if you talk about the grass appearing in the distance, you can tweak oblivion.ini file. For instance:

MinGrassSize=40 (grass is more dense)

fGrassEndDistance=8000.0000
fGrassStartFadeDistance=7000.0000 (increase the distance of grass displayed, so you can see the grass far away)

 

If your graphic card is good enough, it will not have an fps impact.

 

Then you can install a grass mod, for instance : "Oblivion Grass Overhaul" or "Natural Grasses" and "The Natural World" by Discovery.

These are good grass mods, maybe you will not have the grass appearing bug with them.

I don't know what is causing this bug, but i can tell you that I don't have it with these mods.

[Eferas]

It's not a bug, it's the way Oblivion works. I will take a look at the mods you suggested, thank you again. :)

[Surilindur]

Oblivion Reloaded should fix the grass bug, it apparently does it at an engine level or something. It is listed under "game fixes/patches" in the description. If Bevilex uses it (probably does), then that is where the fix is coming from. The base game has that grass disappearing "feature", but Alenet has fixed it in Oblivion Reloaded (and before that in his grass plugin, but the fix is now also in OR and the grass plugin should not be used with OR).

 

The thing with ENB for Oblivion is that there are two version: v0.181 and v0.259. The 181 one has all the fancy graphics changes, but it does not have the ENBoost features. The 259 one has ENBoost, but it does not do any fancy graphics changes. Hopefully that clears it up.

 

If you use Oblivion Reloaded, you might not necessarily need any ENB effects. The ones in OR can be tweaked using ini files, but I myself like how subtle the default effects are - at least the ones I use, I do not use AO and sharpening so I cannot comment on those. And the effects from Oblivion Reloaded apparently are very performance-friendly from what I have noticed. It also comes with an excellent customisable framerate manager that adjusts object rendering distance on the fly to achieve a target framerate (which is probably also the reason why the recommended draw distances and all that in the description are so long).

 

One thing to look into, however, could be the Oblivion Reloaded memory purger (yes, it also has that). At some point there might have been some discussion about how it works or does not work with ENBoost. It was quite a while ago, and I have not actually played the game enough for ages to be able to look into it, but it might be something worth checking.

 

Hopefully that helps. :thumbsup:

 

Edit: Also, I am not sure how editing the grass values in Oblivion.ini works if using Oblivion Reloaded and the grass features from it. The grass ini from OR has some parameters that control the grass. Maybe the values in Oblivion.ini are not used at all? Just an idea. I have adjusted grass values in the OR grass ini and it has worked just fine. But I could be mistaken, too (would not be the first time :tongue: ).

Edited August 30, 2016 by Contrathetix

[Eferas]

Thanks for the clarification! That helps a lot! So, If I install OR I don't need ENBoost, but what about the 4GB Patch, Oblivion Stutter remover and MoreHeap? I suppose OSR is a must, but what about the other 2?

[bevilex]

I would say that OSR, MoreHeap and 4GB Patch are a must. And they are fully compatible with each other.

 

Enboost is fully compatible with the mods above.

 

ENBoost and OR are totally different and don't do the same things. As Contrathetix said, you may need to tweak some OR/ENBoost parameters if you want to use Enboost with Oblivion Reloaded. (look at OR's mod page for more infos).

 

It is also possible to use ENB graphics with Oblivion Reloaded (but it is up to you :tongue:)

 

I myself use OSR + MoreHeap + 4GBPatch + OR + ENB graphics together without any major issues.

Edited August 30, 2016 by bevilex

[Eferas]

I'm installing the game today. One question: what files should I patch with the 4gb patch? I read on some forums only oblivion.exe is needed, others say also the obse_loader and others even the dll files (which sounds weird).

 

EDIT: another question, I installed OSR for last, but how should I configure it now? Oblivion reloaded is managing my fps, more heap the heap, so what is now the right way to configure OSR without having mess up the other mods? Thanks for the help guys :)

Edited August 30, 2016 by Eferas

[bevilex]

Only Oblivion.exe is needed. You can still try on other .dll files (I think the patch makes a back up of the file when you apply it) but I really don't think you will see a difference (I didn't)

 

 

EDIT: another question, I installed OSR for last, but how should I configure it now? Oblivion reloaded is managing my fps, more heap the heap, so what is now the right way to configure OSR without having mess up the other mods? Thanks for the help guys

 

OSR can also manage your FPS, but not in the same way as Oblivion Reloaded, so you can use both with no problems.

I cannot really tell you how to configure OSR, it depends heavily on your mods and computer specs.

My advice is that you should keep it simple : don't touch the OSR.ini parameters, use the default parameters.

I had the best results on my setup with the default parameters and bReplaceHeap = 0.

bReplaceHeap = 1 can make your game unstable.

Edited August 30, 2016 by bevilex