Help with Oblivion FPS

[karoza]

Seems you are correct, I had AGP 8x but now it is lowered down to 4x. And I have always used Windows XP in my opinion it's better than Windows 7 or VIsta for gaming. Edited December 21, 2011 by karoza

[Striker879]

You're preaching to the converted there. I'm an old WinXP dinosaur myself. I have three uninstalled copies of WinXP Pro (plus a shelf full of old unused XP machines that I could recycle). I'll make the change to Windows 10 (or whatever they're up to by then) when they drop security update support for XP.

 

Any idea of what dropped your AGP speed down? Did you get it back up to 8x?

[karoza]

I'm sorry but the AGP was 4x always. But you told me setting to native res would increase my FPS. Why doesn't it work for me? Even setting AA from 2x to none doesn't help. And can you help me in anyway with the distant land? I've tried the Optimized distant land 75% but still it doesn't help.

[Striker879]

I think the reason you're hitting this bottleneck is hardware limitation. What I find confusing is that you say nothing has changed but previously you could get higher frame rates. If nothing has changed you should get the same frame rate as before ... something has changed.

 

When you say your video card always worked at 4x is this because you've checked that before, when it was giving you higher frame rates, or is that based on you don't think anything changed that? I have had machines that the previous day worked fine suddenly refuse to boot (i.e. no POST, no HD access activity ... nada). Once it was a BIOS chip that thermal cycling had pushed partway out of it's socket and the other time it was the AGP card that had crept partway out of it's slot. In both cases reseating solved the problem. As far as my research can tell that video card should work at AGP 8x (providing your motherboard supports AGP 8x, which as far as I know all motherboards that will support P4 should do). If it was working at AGP 8x back when you had good frame rates and now is only working at 4x it would go a long way to explaining your problem.

 

I've no experience with it, but perhaps something like Landscape LOD generator tes4ll-v2 could be used to help your distant land.

 

I don't have a bleeding edge machine either. I'm on a Core 2 Duo 3.0 GHz, 2 GB RAM and now a single Geforce 8800 GTS 640 MB card (used to have two SLIed but one died). I've learned to be happy playing the game without all the fancy 'improvements'. A lot of those 'improvements' aren't meant to be playable for most regular people with regular machines anyways. Screenshotters use them to set up screen shots, and don't care if they get 3 FPS while doing so (just my opinion ... no hate mail please). I would get a completely vanilla game stable and working at acceptable frame rates before I added a single 'improvement'. If you can't get vanilla Oblivion working at acceptable frame rates you stand zero chance of modded Oblivion working better. Get the game installed, patched to version 1.2.0416 and install OBSE. Go through the tutorial dungeon and make a save just before exiting (so that you don't need to redo the tutorial if you don't want to). Then exit the sewers and make your way to the IC. The game doesn't actually stress your hardware until you exit the sewers. Another thing is don't use an old save at this point. Get this install working properly first.

Edited December 21, 2011 by Striker879

[karoza]

I have no improvement mods activated, just the performance ones. I have no idea how 8x dropped to 4x but the Everest program shows only up to 4x is supported. Everything is also perfectly in its place and the only way to get 30 FPS for me would be to turn of Distant Land *sigh*. And my machine took most stress IN the sewers and since I have GOTY edition I must install Shivering Isles to play. With only Oblivion,SI and Knight of the Nine installed I get the same 15 FPS after exiting the sewers. Looks like I can't play a modded Elder Scrolls on my PC so now I have to buy Skyrim for PS3. Only if mods could be installed on consoles...

 

BTW Why doesn't Morrowind run with good FPS on my machine? Its way more than the recommended specs and I should get 30 FPS on 1024x768 with everything maxed. No mods installed yet but I do remember when I had 640 MB Ram and Geforce 440MX 64 MB on same processor it ran perfectly without any lag.Any help???

Edited December 25, 2011 by karoza

[Striker879]

I've never had Morrowind so I can't say much about it. When Oblivion was released it was a hardware hog and your machine isn't much over the minimum specs for the Oblivion GotY edition (and in my opinion marketing guys have way too much input into what those minimum specs are on any game). Those minimum specs are for the vanilla unmodded game. You can find plenty of threads here of people trying to get modded Oblivion running at good framerates on modern hardware.

 

If Everest is saying your card only supports AGP 4x then it's likely a TurboCache model as well. What that means is the video card will use RAM for video processing, robbing it from the CPU for game processing. Your 1 GB will already be a limiting factor, without figuring in the TurboCache situation. I'd say either learn to enjoy the game for gameplay rather than looks (in other words turn down the graphics until the game plays at a good framerate and don't get bugged by how it looks) or enjoy Skyrim on the PS3.

[karoza]

That means I'll have to turn of grass and set distant land to off. Will setting textures from High to Medium make much of a difference?

[Striker879]

I don't have any first hand experience with that, but here's what Koroush has to say about it in his Oblivion Tweak Guide (emphasis added):

Texture Size: The options here are Large, Medium and Small, and changing them will require a restart to reload all the appropriate textures. Textures are the 2D images placed around all 3D objects in the game. A boulder for example is a wireframe skeleton in 3D, with a 2-dimensional boulder surface texture covering it (to see this, use the twf Console Command). When set to Large, the resolution of the 2D texture images used is highest, meaning the textures appear more crisp and real, especially when examined close up. At Medium and Low respectively these textures progressively drop, losing a lot of detail - see an animated screenshot comparison by clicking this link: Obl_Textures.gif (488KB).

 

The texture setting can have a significant impact on performance and stuttering, because these textures load into your graphics card's Video RAM (VRAM), and the larger the texture resolution, the bigger the size of the texture files and hence the more swapping your graphics card has to do to constantly load new textuyre data from the hard drive into VRAM to decompress and display them. Whenever you enter new areas or see new objects/creatures/buildings, the higher this setting the more loading pauses/stutter you will get, and the lower your FPS will drop, especially if you have less VRAM, system RAM and/or a slower hard drive. For those with less than 256MB of VRAM, I recommend Medium as a good balance of visual quality and performance. For those with slow hard drives and/or less than 1GB of RAM, Low is recommended if you constantly find the game stuttering or slowing down. See the settings below, the Troubleshooting Tips and the Advanced Tweaking sections for a range of other tweaks and settings which in combination with each other can significantly reduce stutter. There is no single magic fix to this issue.

If I am correct about your video card using TurboCache it makes the situation worse because not only does the initial data transfer and final video frame need to transfer over your 4x AGP bus but also any TurboCache transfers while the video card is calculating the frame. I'm sure there are plenty of GPU cycles wasted waiting for information as well as CPU cycles wasted waiting for video to be finished. Have a look through his Hardware Confusion and Hardware Confusion 2009 to get an appreciation of how the different pieces affect one another. Believe me, the hardest part of building a machine is deciding what parts to buy. If money was no object it would be far simpler ... just buy the fastest of each component. I don't live in that world myself.

[karoza]

Well now I can get 24-32 FPS in cities and in forests I get 17-18 FPS and I can't help it because no one can help me with the forest(any help???) but in combat my FPS goes down to 11 in forests. So can you help me with ONLY the forest bits???

I changed my Grass wind magnitude to 0 both min and max will but can someone tell me the original numbers?

Edited December 26, 2011 by karoza

[Striker879]

Drop your tree fade setting down (again courtesy of Koroush):

Tree Fade: This slider controls the amount of detail visible on trees into the distance. As you move the slider to the left, the less branches and leaves will be shown on trees. This will improve FPS in areas with trees, such as heavily forested areas. See an animated screenshot comparison by clicking this link: Obl_TreeFade.gif (403KB).

In your Oblivion.ini (located in your Documents and Settings\[username]\My Documents\My Games\Oblivion NOT the Oblivion_default.ini found in your game install Oblivion folder):

bDoCanopyShadowPass=1 - If set to 0, removes all tree shadows, which can improve FPS in forested outdoor areas.