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Oblivion Runs Like Garbage


xTLx

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After purchasing Oblivion GOTY edition a while back on steam I decided I would find some mods and see what all the fuss was about. Now, admittingly, the game is about six years old so my expectations weren't huge, but this was just ridiculous. Right now I'm re-installing the game so that I can decide what to do with it, but a few months ago when I tried to mess around with it, the game was essentially unplayable. I don't have some blazing fast rig, but my laptop can handle Skyrim at medium/high settings fine enough. When I tried playing Oblivion however, even without mods, the frame rate dropped so low when exiting buildings or going outside that the game became either frozen/unplayable or crashed all together in some areas. Interestingly dungeons and indoor areas ran smoothly and at expected quality, but it seems that my laptop is not compatible with the game or it cannot handle the enormous amount of CPU the game begins to take up. I've tried playing the game both in vanilla and with mods and while they both are terribly choppy it seems that the mods in many cases worsen it. I've tried optimizing the game's performance with several mods and tweaks to the .ini, gone through many combinations of settings, and even updated my drivers, but nothing seems to work. After seeing older outdated machines run the game alright I'm convinced that there must be some sort of glaring error or incompatibility, because despite reading threads online with similar problems I've found no solution.

 

I understand my laptop is nowhere near the level of many computers, but it runs Fallout 3 and other titles flawlessly. So here are some specs, maybe someone could offer some help or suggestions, and feel free to ask questions:

 

Processor: Intel® Core™ i7 Processor

 

Memory: 4GB

 

Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce 310m

 

OS: Windows 7 64bit

 

I've also tried a variety of resolutions and options within the software provided by NVIDIA.

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Hmm... Weird.

 

Maybe is has something to with your system. My new laptop didn't run Fallout 3 very well because it was designed for Win Vista, and I have Win 7 like you.

 

Or maybe it's your graphics card, I have a Nvidia GT 555M graphics card, but at first my games wouldn't recognise it. Therefore I couldn't play Skyrim as my computer used the basic default graphics card instead of the Nvidia one, but I managed to fix it somehow. Try opening your Oblivion Starter and check which graphics card is being used.

 

Other than that, I have no idea(but alas, I'm not overly clever when it comes to computers).

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u said framerate is fine indoors / in caverns, but poor outside. maybe you forgot some tweaks on your .ini file. search for the following values:

 

uGridsToLoad set the value behind it to 3 it controls how many grids in the world get loaded at full detail (something like that :D )

bDrawShaderGrass set the value to 0 it controls if grass is enabled or not

uGridDistantCount set the value to 10 also some distance detail stuff that gets loaded

 

 

changing these settings will (hopefully) positively affect your RAM and gpu.

 

 

try with the changed settings, if it doesnt help, maybe here u can find even more settings i didnt see:

 

http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_8.html

 

good luck and post your results!

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When you say without mods do you mean disabling the esp's or actually uninstalling them properly. There is a big difference. For instance if you had Qarls texture pack installed, you'd have to completely uninstall all the textures it added in order to make it go away. Same thing goes for VWD mods, once you run tes4lodgen, it builds a reference of all objects that have a _far.nif, the only way to disable it is to remove all those nifs that were added and run tes4lodgen again so it rebuilds the lod without all those extra buildings. If you're running a vanilla game straight from the archives and it's still slow then something else must be slowing it down. Your PC seems recent enough to be able to handle the vanilla game.

 

There are a lot of things that can be done. Mods like Oblivion Stutter Remover and Streamline can help. Quiet feet tends to help a lot as well. You can disable the wind on grass (trees will still sway) and even reduce the distance/density of grass for a good boost. Reducing uGridDistantCount and uGridDistantTrees is especially useful when using VWD mods. Combine it with the fog options from streamline to mask the empty terrain beyond the tree range. From what I've read, changing uGridsToLoad from the default 5 can cause bugs and is not recommended.

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Hmm... Weird.

 

Maybe is has something to with your system. My new laptop didn't run Fallout 3 very well because it was designed for Win Vista, and I have Win 7 like you.

 

Or maybe it's your graphics card, I have a Nvidia GT 555M graphics card, but at first my games wouldn't recognise it. Therefore I couldn't play Skyrim as my computer used the basic default graphics card instead of the Nvidia one, but I managed to fix it somehow. Try opening your Oblivion Starter and check which graphics card is being used.

 

Other than that, I have no idea(but alas, I'm not overly clever when it comes to computers).

 

Well strangely when I first launched the game from a clean install it said it didn't recognize my graphics card, although now it displays the correct one. For some reason its always told me that the game cannot run with both anti-aliasing and HDR running. Is this normal?

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When you say without mods do you mean disabling the esp's or actually uninstalling them properly. There is a big difference. For instance if you had Qarls texture pack installed, you'd have to completely uninstall all the textures it added in order to make it go away. Same thing goes for VWD mods, once you run tes4lodgen, it builds a reference of all objects that have a _far.nif, the only way to disable it is to remove all those nifs that were added and run tes4lodgen again so it rebuilds the lod without all those extra buildings. If you're running a vanilla game straight from the archives and it's still slow then something else must be slowing it down. Your PC seems recent enough to be able to handle the vanilla game.

 

There are a lot of things that can be done. Mods like Oblivion Stutter Remover and Streamline can help. Quiet feet tends to help a lot as well. You can disable the wind on grass (trees will still sway) and even reduce the distance/density of grass for a good boost. Reducing uGridDistantCount and uGridDistantTrees is especially useful when using VWD mods. Combine it with the fog options from streamline to mask the empty terrain beyond the tree range. From what I've read, changing uGridsToLoad from the default 5 can cause bugs and is not recommended.

 

I uninstalled the mods correctly and did a reinstall of the entire game to boot. I'll try fooling around with grass and fog options you suggested and see how things turn out.

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Hmm... Weird.

 

Maybe is has something to with your system. My new laptop didn't run Fallout 3 very well because it was designed for Win Vista, and I have Win 7 like you.

 

Or maybe it's your graphics card, I have a Nvidia GT 555M graphics card, but at first my games wouldn't recognise it. Therefore I couldn't play Skyrim as my computer used the basic default graphics card instead of the Nvidia one, but I managed to fix it somehow. Try opening your Oblivion Starter and check which graphics card is being used.

 

Other than that, I have no idea(but alas, I'm not overly clever when it comes to computers).

 

Well strangely when I first launched the game from a clean install it said it didn't recognize my graphics card, although now it displays the correct one. For some reason its always told me that the game cannot run with both anti-aliasing and HDR running. Is this normal?

 

No idea, I just throwed out some more or less random ideas:D

 

Anyway I really do hope you manage to figure this out, Oblivion is such a great game.

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For some reason its always told me that the game cannot run with both anti-aliasing and HDR running. Is this normal?

 

Hi, yes that is normal. If you want to run both you'll have to force AA through your Graphics Driver Settings. This will probably result in another performance hit though.

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Adding AA to the game can also be done using FXAA Injector so you don't need to enforce it via graphics drivers.

 

And... >.<

 

Excuse me for being a forum nazi, but is there a particular reason for posting this topic twice?

Edited by chakaru11
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