Low FPS in Chapel of Stendarr in Chorrol

[Murielkai]

I am using Better Cities and when I zone into the Chapel of Stendarr in Chorrol my FPS drops drastically, the reason apparently is because there are pieces of the old vanilla chapel superimposed over the new one.

 

I recall having this issue a few years back but I don't think it ever got resolved. Has anyone else ever heard anything about this?

 

I only have a basic knowledge of TESEdit but I am sure there is a way to check for mod conflict and see what other mods might be altering this cell, any tips or advice on how to do this would be greatly appreciated.

 

I am using MO2 so tomorrow I'll do a dry run with nothing but Better Cities installed and see if the issue is still there.

[MisterLG]

Did you ever figure this out? I'm also getting low FPS in the Chapel of Stendarr with Better Cities.

[Oblivionaddicted]

While playing open the console ², click on the overlapping elements, if you select a vanilla one the code will start with 00, while you can see the numbers on the screen type disable, if the result looks bad and with the numbers still visible type enable.

 

At worst open better cities in the TESCS (preferably extended) and remove the superimposed vanilla elements.

[MisterLG]

Hey thanks for responding.

 

I'm guessing I don't have the same issue as the OP, disabling objects in the chapel just caused them to disappear.

The low frame rates don't happen with Better Cities alone. They were still pretty good after installing Immersive Interiors,

but after adding in QTP3 It's just chugging below 30fps.

 

I'm using the 4gb patch and all the stability fixers I can find.

 

Update: The low fps happens with Better Cities alone. It is happening in the daytime when there are many NPCs about.

Chorrol is the worst for it, especially in the chapel (average below 30fps and as low as 9fps)

Walking around the Imperial city at the busiest time of day never went below 60fps except for the marked district where it was about 45.

Other cities did go as low as 30fps, again only at the busiest times of day with many NPCs.

 

Could this be some sort of limitation that Oblivion has that I haven't addressed?

 

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Edited August 12, 2020 by MisterLG

[Striker879]

If it's times when you have lots of NPCs I'd say it's a CPU bottleneck you're hitting. Oblivion isn't a modern game, and none of the available tweaks and utilities will make it properly use a modern machine. Modern machines trade raw speed for sophistication, and that has added a feature that works against Oblivion's basic design concepts.

 

A modern machine will do many tasks at the same time. Because not all tasks take the same amount of time modern machines have introduced long pipelines to the actual execution units for their multiple processing units and use advanced guesswork to try to anticipate what a given program is going to want next. When a program actually wants something different instead, the entire pipeline contents for one of it's processing units needs to be completely flushed and then repopulated, which takes several CPU cycles. In general if the program is designed for multiple threads then it will suffer a less noticeable performance hit.

 

Oblivion (for the most part) does one thing at a time. The game was designed back in the heydays of the GHz Wars, where each CPU generation was faster than the last in raw CPU speed. It was hitting the speed limits imposed by the physical structure of silicon and the expense of the materials needed to continue that speed advance that caused the sea change of looking faster by doing more things at once, where we are today. Oblivion doesn't even know that doing more than one thing at a time exists.

 

On a fast modern CPU that's why you'll still see microstutters when playing Oblivion. The CPU thought that the game would want to know B after it found out A, but in fact the game needs to know C next, so we wait while the CPU flushes an execution unit's pipeline and then refills it with the info needed to find the value of C. If instead you have a more budget minded machine then your CPU is going to be less than blazingly fast. What that means is the microstutters will be more noticeable.

 

The more NPCs you have in the scene the more the CPU has to do to keep them all moving. You increase the CPU's workload and the opportunities for a missed prediction on what the game will need to know next.

Edited August 12, 2020 by Striker879

[MisterLG]

Thanks Striker, I was already suspecting a CPU bottleneck since the dips we're sticking around when I went down to 1080p. I have a Ryzen 3700x so the single core performance isn't even the best out there right now. It just sucks because for the purposes of modding oblivion it seems like it's just not fast enough at all. I would be fine with limiting my frame rate to 60fps which is the lowest it gets pretty much everywhere except that chapel in chorrol where it just tanks.

 

Also my apologies to OP for hijacking this thread.

Edited August 12, 2020 by MisterLG

[Striker879]

Thanks Striker, I was already suspecting a CPU bottleneck since the dips we're sticking around when I went down to 1080p. I have a Ryzen 3700x so the single core performance isn't even the best out there right now. It just sucks because for the purposes of modding oblivion it seems like it's just not fast enough at all. I would be fine with limiting my frame rate to 60fps which is the lowest it gets pretty much everywhere except that chapel in chorrol where it just tanks.

 

Also my apologies to OP for hijacking this thread.

 

From what I see on the AMD page for your CPU it isn't a raw speed problem in my opinion ... it's more related to a "we're going to try to look as fast as possible" problem, that smoke and mirrors act I alluded to.

 

What you'll need to do is decide on how important the features of a mod are to you vs the downsides that mod brings as baggage. So how much time do you spend in the "bad places" vs how long do you spend in the "good" places, and how good your skills of ignoring "the bad" are.

[MisterLG]

 

Thanks Striker, I was already suspecting a CPU bottleneck since the dips we're sticking around when I went down to 1080p. I have a Ryzen 3700x so the single core performance isn't even the best out there right now. It just sucks because for the purposes of modding oblivion it seems like it's just not fast enough at all. I would be fine with limiting my frame rate to 60fps which is the lowest it gets pretty much everywhere except that chapel in chorrol where it just tanks.

 

Also my apologies to OP for hijacking this thread.

 

From what I see on the AMD page for your CPU it isn't a raw speed problem in my opinion ... it's more related to a "we're going to try to look as fast as possible" problem, that smoke and mirrors act I alluded to.

 

What you'll need to do is decide on how important the features of a mod are to you vs the downsides that mod brings as baggage. So how much time do you spend in the "bad places" vs how long do you spend in the "good" places, and how good your skills of ignoring "the bad" are.

I just tested this on an i7 7700k as well. Still a very modern CPU, but at least it does have a slightly higher boost clock for the single core performance. The frame rate "lows" were pretty much the same everywhere including the chapel.

This is interesting because on my Ryzen, I'm using a 2070 super at 1440p and on the i7 it's a 1060 3gb card at 1080p. I would think the frame dips would be quite different.

 

I wonder what it is about that chapel that makes it the lowest frame rate of all. It's not like there aren't areas with more NPCs going about.

[Striker879]

I have an older Logitech G15 keyboard that has an LCD screen. Using MSI Afterburner I can keep track of my GPU and VRAM usage while playing. I find it comes in handy when I've been in spots that really soak up the VRAM (my own fault ... sort of longer story than needed here) and I know when saving and possibly exiting for a restart is getting to be something I should consider.

 

A lot of things that are mod added can really boost up the loads on your CPU and GPU. Meshes that have a gazillion vertices or textures that are far higher resolution than necessary are a couple of possible culprits. I've seen mod added jewelry that when disabled/removed via NifSkope made a huge improvement ... it wasn't the size of the mesh but how far overboard the mod author went on detail.

 

Figuring out what is the root cause is the key.