Bad Performance on good machine (help)

[Brits]

I have a more than able machine to run Oblivion, and have been told that it should run it at high quality with barely any hick-ups. The problem is, it doesn't perform nearly as well as I thought (or others think) it should.

 

I run Oblivion at 1024x768, HDR enabled, actor fade to minimum (in cities), object fade to about 1/4, no grass, no self-shadowing, textures on medium, full view distance (with distant buildings).. and everything else at a reasonable setting.

Most of the time, I'll get around 30 FPS.. but in cities it'll drop to as low as maybe 4-8 FPS at times. Basically, it runs bad for my setup (which FAR surpasses recommended specs).

In retrospect, I run UT3 at 1024x768, full detail, with rare occurances of slowdown.

 

Here are my specs:

 

BFG 7900 GT OC 256mb (475mhz/680mhz)

AMD Athalon 64 X2 4200+ dual core

2x1024 OCZ PC2 6400 DDR2

ASUS M2N-MX SE mobo

On board sound (no sound card)

Win XP SP2

 

So, what do you guys think? Shouldn't I be running this smoother than I am?

 

I should point out that I'm not running the 64 bit version of XP or whatever it's called. I'm not even really sure what the difference is, all I know is that if u have a 64 bit processor u can get a better version of windows or something

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

thanks.

 

 

PS. Sorry for my first post being a whiney baby post, but I really think I'm being shafted in terms of performance potential :P

[hoots7]

I have a more than able machine to run Oblivion, and have been told that it should run it at high quality with barely any hick-ups. The problem is, it doesn't perform nearly as well as I thought (or others think) it should.

 

I run Oblivion at 1024x768, HDR enabled, actor fade to minimum (in cities), object fade to about 1/4, no grass, no self-shadowing, textures on medium, full view distance (with distant buildings).. and everything else at a reasonable setting.

Most of the time, I'll get around 30 FPS.. but in cities it'll drop to as low as maybe 4-8 FPS at times. Basically, it runs bad for my setup (which FAR surpasses recommended specs).

In retrospect, I run UT3 at 1024x768, full detail, with rare occurances of slowdown.

 

Here are my specs:

 

BFG 7900 GT OC 256mb (475mhz/680mhz)

AMD Athalon 64 X2 4200+ dual core

2x1024 OCZ PC2 6400 DDR2

ASUS M2N-MX SE mobo

On board sound (no sound card)

Win XP SP2

 

So, what do you guys think? Shouldn't I be running this smoother than I am?

 

I should point out that I'm not running the 64 bit version of XP or whatever it's called. I'm not even really sure what the difference is, all I know is that if u have a 64 bit processor u can get a better version of windows or something

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

thanks.

 

 

PS. Sorry for my first post being a whiney baby post, but I really think I'm being shafted in terms of performance potential :P

The CPU (AMD can run in both 64 & 32 bit mode) & Operating System seems OK.

Actually you’re right it all seems good.

Have you tried reinstalling it?

If you have 2 hard drives make sure Oblivion & “My Documents” is on the same drive as the OS (C:).

I read yesterday that this is important.

[Brits]

Everything's on one drive (with 38 gigs free space).

Also, I recently upgraded to my current specs and Oblivion was one of the first games I installed, so I don't see how reinstalling would help. When I first played it without any mods or graphical tweaks (ini) it still ran pretty crap.

 

You agree though that I should be running it pretty damn well though, yeah?

[Abramul]

The slowdown only occurs in cities?

[WoogieMonster]

Have you added a lot of extra npc's to the cities?

[Brits]

No, but as soon as more than 2 NPCs are on screen there's a drastic performance hit. It also slows down alot when in the wilderness with a lot of trees/rocks/grass aorund. I turned off the grass but considering all those things are instanced, you'd think that the performance hit wouldn't be so major.

 

As for the cities though, sure, I could see how having more than a few NPCs on screen would cause some slowdown but the polycounts and texture sizes are less in size than UT3 or even HL2.

I could be wrong though, because it seems Bethesda sort of relied on high poly meshes rather than nice detailed textures in a lot of areas, especially the cities.

 

Still, yes it's a poorly optimized engine/game, but I think most of you guys would agree, I should be running it nicely.

[damstachizz]

Have you updated Oblivion?

[bben46]

My first guess would be your lack of a sound card. The on board audio steals clock cycles from the processor and memory from your on board RAM. To test this theory, turn off your onboard audio in the BIOS and try running Oblivion. Of course there will be no sounds, but if you see a noticeable increase in performance a cheap sound card will probably work wonders for you. Just remember to disable the onboard audio when you install it.

 

Post back and let us know what happens.

[Vagrant0]

I would be tempted to think that it's the videocard. The issue is not file size of textures, but the number of textures and the speed that they can be rendered. Inside towns you can have alot of textures being used (more so if you have a texture pack installed), towns are also by nature polygon heavy with each building at somewhere around 10k-20k polygons. You might want to try changing some of the higher end lighting and rendering options, like turning off shadows/reflections or switching to bloom lighting as those things might end up being too memory heavy, causing things to slow down. Playing the game in windowed mode, or with Fraps running can also slow down frame rate.

 

And of course having the 1.0 version that came with the normal game or the non-updated 1.2 patch that came with the GOTY version can cause ALOT of problems.

[Darkieus]

His Video card seems to be fine, what he's talking about seems (to me) to be a problem with outdated drivers. This does not mean only on your video card, check your BIOS and other Motherboard additions. This includes Sound drivers and PHYSICS drivers if you have a Physics cards. If it continues, it could always be a problem with your processor. Some processors tend to overwork themselves depending on the type. Dual cores should be able to keep this game running fine- The biggest thing you might have missed is defragging your computer! Make sure you do this! Oh, and check the memory. How much you have on a page file can make all the difference, this game Oblivion uses ALOT of Memory! I've been told different, but my computer (a 6k 6.22 ghz) Quad core had low pagefile, and turning it up a smidge made all the difference in oblivion. I hope this helps, but I'm not a computer genius.

 

P.S. This really sounds like a problem with memory.