Oblivion FPS Issues

[AnImpatientFan]

Hi I recently have been getting horrible FPS with Oblivion, 20FPS avg.

My Oblivion is supported by a number of enchancing mods which I believe are the issue.

Qarls, OBGE v3, Max_Taels and RAEVWD can produce results like this but aren't exactly great on FPS.

My current specs are:

Win. 7 64 Bit
8-core i7 with a punch of 1.8ghz (I think?)
ATI Radeon HD5650 550mhz
8GB DDR4 RAM
Am I doing something wrong, or is it just the incredible stress of the mods on almost any system + GameByro doing what it does best, rendering useless crap.

[Dr.DeathDefing]

How the hell have you got problems?
i7? 3.4 ghz? That is the equivalent of 27.2 ghz!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I envy you!!!!!!!! And 8GB RAM?
Look, i think you might want to try typing in TG in the cosole, that gets rid of the grass and I heard when it gets shiny and when the climate is windy, it moves a lot and that can cause major problems.
If that doesn't work, try without the mods as I got a mod and it made everything laggy so I got rid of it and it went fine.
Hope that helps

[AnImpatientFan]

Nvm, wrong figures.

27ghz would probably fry any modern PC.

[morcroft]

I'm not too familiar with Win7 under the hood, but my bet would be that Oblivion is only really using one core: it mostly predates the multicore trend. I have a core 2 and it only ever uses 50% - ie 1 core equivalent.

You could try running perfmon and use it to collect system stats while you play - that should tell you if it's using one core or many. The OS can't just spread processes out across all processors to give you the equivalent of one 27GHz processor - you still really have 8 x 3.4 GHz processing units - and I'm not convinced the pairs really act as truly separate entities.

I recall seeing somthing about thread settings in the ini file - not sure if the threads can be distributed across cores - if they can then raising those values could help.

RAM isn't going to make much difference after the first GB or so.

Then of course, Oblivion is 32 bit so Windows is having to do some work switching it to run on a 64-bit OS. The "Windows on Windows" system has some overhead, I think.

I think really there's only so fast Oblivion can go. Skyrim's going to have to be designed to use multiple cores and graphics cards concurrently to use today's hardware so hopefully will scale up better over the next half decade or so.


EDIT:

From http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Ini_Settings

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)


Otherwise leave them at the default.

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.

[Dr.DeathDefing]

Originally posted by AnImpatientFan
I mean a total of 3.2ghz

27ghz would probably fry any modern PC.

Well, that is a bit of a bad pc. For i7, that dosnt make sense.
But I think Morocroft is probably right.

[AnImpatientFan]

Actually I've had a look and I have an 8-core 1.6ghz, so 12.8ghz.

[Lady Nerevar]

I think its just an issue of your PC being too modern for Oblivion. It doesn't recognize all that extra fluff, and runs like it would on a single core. With all the graphics mods you have, thats not going to be very good. Though tbh 20 fps is hardly what I would call horrible :/

[Dr.DeathDefing]

Well, to me it seems like an illogical reason for it being to modern] for oblivion but yes, graphics mods are a bit of a pain sometimes and it makes much more sense for it being of that GHZ speed, cause' that is just ridiculous what you tols me the first time. I'm unsure but it could be a problem I had with FO3, somewhere in the ini is a part where u change it so it reads it as 1 or 2 or 3 cores or whatever core you want it to. This could rule out any confusion your PC is having in working out what the hell is happening.

[Lady Nerevar]

Oblivion's code doesn't recognize that a PC can have more than one core, so it won't use anything more than that one core. Its a pretty common issue: PS7, for example, doesn't know that a PC can have a terabyte of space, and refuses to save to disks with a terabyte or more.