How well should I be able to run Oblivion?

[Rennn]

I thought my pc would be able to demolish Oblivion on ultra settings, but oddly enough, it can't.

I have:

GTX 460 w/ 768MB GDDR5

AMD Phenom II Quad-Core @3.2Ghz

4GB generic RAM

750W Antec Earthwatts PSU

 

Now, I am using QTP3 and the 3GB patch. QTP3, however, can't be the issue because my framerate was equally unstable before I installed it. Before QTP3, I was getting 30-40 fps on med-high settings. After GTP3 and the 3GB patch, I get 30-40 fps on med-high settings, so there's no change. I guess they 'cancelled each other out' in terms of performance. Normally I'd be happy with 30 fps, but I plan to install OBGE, and that'll drop it even more. I'd like to find a way to increase my fps so that I can take the hit from OBGE.

 

What settings would you suspect my rig of running Oblivion on, and at what framerate?

[Nitefox98]

You won't see much better than 30fps after modding. My thread lists my mods and specs which are slightly better, and I dip down to 19fps at times, with OSR capped at 30. I just run OBGE's MDLAA and CrysisDoF with vanilla HDR.

[Raffer]

Oblivion is limited to one core only, so the CPU is the bottleneck on every newer PC.

[Lazuri]

That's not completely true, you can do some tweaks in the .ini file to make it make better use of your dual/quadcore.

 

"If you have a Dual/Quad core Processor or a processor with Hyper-Threading, then set these values to this:

 

bUseThreadedBlood=1 (default 0)

bUseThreadedMorpher=1 (default 0)

bUseThreadedTempEffects=1 (default 0)

bUseThreadedParticleSystem=1 (default 0)

bBackgroundPathing=1 (default 0)

bUseBackgroundFileLoader=1 (default 0)

iNumHavokThreads=3 (default 1)

iThreads=10 (default 3)"

 

"However, it should be noted that an article on FiringSquad found no benefit in using these settings. Whatever the configuration of these INI variables, it is generally acknowledged that Oblivion makes very little use of additional CPU's/CPU cores. This may be because all of the functions that these variables enable multithreading for are not CPU intensive tasks, there appears to be no variable related to enabling multithreading for the main scene renderer, which would most benefit from such an optimization. Things such as the Particle System and Shader Effects are not used in excess in Oblivion, so using multiple threads for processing related to them will likely not have much benefit.

 

Despite dubious significance to performance, these options can effectively prevent or at least reduce crashes on multi-core systems."

 

I also strongly recommend downloading Streamline from the nexus.

Edited February 6, 2012 by Lazuri

[Rennn]

I have Streamline. It did decrease stutter.

 

I suppose decreasing pre-rendered frames in my Nvidia control panel would improve the framerate, then?

Gamebooster would probably have quite a large effect as well.