HannahC Posted February 12, 2012 Share Posted February 12, 2012 Hi all. Recently I got a new computer and decided to reinstall Oblivion. This time I decided to install some texture packs (specically QTP3 Redimized) and also set oblivion textures to Large (my old computer could only handle medium). I also run Better Cities and have a few OBGE modules. In terms of FPS everything still runs at about 30-40. The lowest I've see it is 25 and that's in Better Cities Skingrad where I also have Crowded Cities. However I've also noticed that compared to my previous Oblivion experience, I also randomly crash a lot more. I use OSR, Streamline and have all the latest Unofficial Patches but still I get these CTD. The game itself doesn't stutter or freeze, the crash happens suddenly and without any prior signs that there are any strains on my system. So I went through a systematic process of lowering my game settings (Turning off and on shadow filtering, HDR, Bloom, non HDR or Bloom, adjusting Actor/Object/Item distances etc etc) and found that setting textures to medium eliminated these sudden crashes completely (before they would crash after about 10-15 minutes of playing). Feeling a bit miffed I reinstalled my game this time without QTP3 and set my textures back on Large and the random CTDs comeback so I figure for some reason my computer can handle QTP3 but strangely not the remaining Oblivion large textures. So I guess I'm stuck playing with medium textures but my question is, do I still get the benefits of QTP3 if I reinstall it but play on medium oblivion textures? Is there some tweak that would allow my computer to better handle oblivion large textures? My system has 6GB of RAM and my video card is an Nvidia Geforce GT 540m. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Striker879 Posted February 12, 2012 Share Posted February 12, 2012 I did a Google on your notebooks video card. Third from the top, right after NVIDIA official specs page is this forum link. Not sure if any of the issues discussed strike a bell with you or not, but something mentioned at the bottom of the second page (post #40 by sile119) leads me to my suggestion. Try turning your laptop settings to 'high performance' and see if you can run textures set to Large (naturally you'll either sacrifice battery life or need to run plugged in). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HannahC Posted February 12, 2012 Author Share Posted February 12, 2012 I did a Google on your notebooks video card. Third from the top, right after NVIDIA official specs page is this forum link. Not sure if any of the issues discussed strike a bell with you or not, but something mentioned at the bottom of the second page (post #40 by sile119) leads me to my suggestion. Try turning your laptop settings to 'high performance' and see if you can run textures set to Large (naturally you'll either sacrifice battery life or need to run plugged in).Hey thanks. Apparantly it was set on "balanced" performance even when plugged in. I've also been tweaking some settings in my Oblivion Stutter Remover, specifically this: "Master\bReplaceHeap: (defaults to 0, consider changing to 1)This is still off by default because some people experience instability with it. Turning on heap replacement does improvement performance though. The amount it improves performance by depends upon how much multithreading your copy of Oblivion tries to do - if it tries to do a lot of multithreading then this setting can produce really huge improvements. This also helps with some serious performance issues that arise in longer game sessions when playing a heavily modded game on Oblivion on Windows XP. If you have trouble with Master\bReplaceHeap turned on then you might try different heap algorithms by changing Heap\iHeapAlgorithm, which should usually be either 1, 5, or 3. " Changed it to 1 and so far it hasn't crashed yet. I have no idea what heap replacement is (be great if someone explained it to me) but either your suggestion or this tweak (or both) seem to have solved my promblem. Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Striker879 Posted February 12, 2012 Share Posted February 12, 2012 (edited) One caveat I can offer on running your laptop plugged in for long periods of time is remove your battery while doing this once it is fully charged. Lithium ion batteries have a lifespan that is limited to start with (that starts when it is manufactured and will diminish it's available capacity over the lifetime of the battery). Leaving a fully charged battery plugged in will accelerate the rate of loss. I used my laptop as my primary machine for a while, so I learned from experience (prior to studying up on batteries, and their vagaries). Wikipedia offers more than you ever wanted to know about heap. I would call it an area of your computer's memory that is allocated to store some particular data. If that data gets corrupted in any way then all operations that depend on it will fail. In the case of the OSR note, if you periodically replaced the heap data with fresh values you'd avoid that data corruption problem (or perhaps the OSR note is referring to data fragmentation in the heap ... one sure way to get a response from those who really are knowledgeable is put out some inaccurate information ... that bait will catch 'em every time). Edited February 12, 2012 by Striker879 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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