Afternoon all,

I can't help feeling a little disappointed with Oblivion performance so I thought I'd share my experiences and see if it's just me or whether it happens to others with similar hardware. All settings are maxed and I'm using AA rather than HDR.

Generally speaking the game runs perfectly smoothly in 'normal' play (ie travelling to different places, light combat, magic) Galloping on a horse is definitely a little choppy.

Wolves for some reason give me a visible and serious performance hit.

It really does slow to a crawl when trying to escape guards across country - after five minutes of running/galloping constantly through the countryside with perhaps two guards, a few monsters and a couple of wolves chasing me we're talking perhaps 5 fps.

The above all are taking place with default .ini settings. Extending the scenery draw distance (as per the .ini tweak) does hit performance (understandably). Standing on that lake with all the vicious slaughterfish, setting ugridstoload = 10 is largely fine. 15 drops me to about 15fps and setting it to 20 brings it to about 2fps.


I'd be interested to hear whether the above symptoms are typical.

Specs:

Athlon64 X2 4400+
256MB GeForce 7900GT
Asus A8N-SLI Premium
2GB Crucial DDR RAM
Windows 2000

I only just built this thing with the intention of it being a beast of a gaming PC so am understandably a little bit miffed to experience any form of slowdown whatsoever. I'm also using the latest Nvidia drivers. Any idea what gives? TIA!

[ 04-19-2006, 08:59 AM: Message edited by: shamrock_uk ]

With default "high" settings, my x800 runs the game alright...Then, I discovered the world of no grass, and I haven't looked back.

Seriously, my game runs SIGNIFICANTLY better, and all I did was turn grass distance to zero. The textures below the grass are, for the most part, quite pretty, and it doesn't hurt my feelings in the least, especially when I gain 10 frames per second out of it.

I also have AA and Bloom lighting (no HDR support over here...) turned off, but everything else is on, and maxed.

p3 2.53
1 gb RAM
windows xp pro, all updates
x700 pro, 256mb w/ omega drivers
audigy sound card, old old drivers

running on high settings.
have OBMM installed with ALL the mods enabled (esp all the texture replacers: terrain, grass, armor, weapons, etc), except for ones that make beasts and baddies harder to kill.

no real problems, except slowdowns during fights with multiple enemies at one time. but they were a bit of slideshow without any mods enabled, so i'm dealing with it.

V***V

Why would you replace the game textures Vesselle? Are they better than the game ones?

One common thread is that you all have ATI cards, I wonder if Oblivion doesn't like Nvidia. Anyone out there with a high-end Nvidia card?

Your problem isn't your pc, it works the game quite fine. The problem is the bad programmers of Bethsoft who decided for some reason that non-human footstep sounds should be in another format which slows down your 'puter IMMENSELY if you don't have an über soundsystem. So search on TESSource a bit for a mod that removes the non-human footstep sounds, it's there, and it works. ;)

My puter is a AMD Athlon XP 2400+
1.5 Gb RAM
Windows XP pro
GeForce 6600 (256 ram)

I run on the lowest res, no HDR or AA, no shadows except for canopy, and the rest doesn't matter. When in fights or cities, the framerate drops somewhat, sometimes enough to make it frustrating. I've seen my vidcard do 800x600, with HDR and full character shadows with 30 average FPS, so I know it isn't that which gives me problems. Any ideas? Is it the CPU?

Thanks JrKASperov, I'll check that out when I get home!

As for your CPU, what about calling up the system monitor and letting it run in the background? Then you could review the graph after play and see if it's been anywhere near 100%.

Good idea, let's give it a try. :D

Note: It's MY CPU I'm worried about, yours is fine. It IS the sound problem, seriously. Had the same problem, just like many people on the TES forums.

[ 04-19-2006, 03:45 PM: Message edited by: JrKASperov ]

Hmm...well that's not it.

Link. One of the cores does get pretty close to 90% near the end, but it's not maxed and it's not a RAM shortage either. With a wolf, a man and a mudcrab chasing me on a horse it went down to about 5fps.

That makes it sounds like my graphics card, yet asides from the 512MB 7900GT and the 7900GTX versions this is about as good as you can buy. I just don't get it :(

I'm just hunting down your mods now [img]smile.gif[/img]

http://www.tessource.net/files/file.php?id=1999

That's the sound fix. Quiet Feet.

(I just thought I'd find it for you since I'm supposed to learn this exam [img]tongue.gif[/img] )

My hero! Smooth as silk now! That really is sloppy on Bethesda's part. I'm still using my old and faithful soundblaster live which I guess it the reason. I didn't see the point in shelling out for an uber sound system when it sounds nice, does EAX and I only have two speakers!

Humph, whoever heard of a soundcard as the performance bottleneck? :D

Many thanks once again!

Edit: Good luck with the exam!

[ 04-19-2006, 04:14 PM: Message edited by: shamrock_uk ]

Wait I had this problem too. I had intergrated sound and the footsteps would slow me to a crawl. Rats would kill me...go figure. It was a slideshow.

Then I installed my SB live and it ran fine since it was an actual soundcard (not sure why your card is acting up still). That mod fixes it but removes the sounds of footsteps. If you want the sounds try lowering sound acceleration to basic and see if it changes. The sound itself may be disgusting though. So yeah, it is bloody annoying. Humanoids aren't affected it seems, only beasts etc.

I'm planning to buy this game but I gotta ask first; will it run well with the following specs (or is it time to buy an XBox360)?

AMD Turion64 ML-34
ATI Mobility Radeon x700 128MB, PCI-Express.

It's a laptop as you can see. I don't demand the best performance the game can muster, just good enough to play.

It won't play incredibly well on that card. It will play but bare minimum IMHO. You would have to tweak the game for about a week and lose some serious eye-candy in the process.

Thanks! Perhaps I should buy an XBox 360 then.

I don't understand. I'm running a motherboard and video card one generation under yours and I don't have these problems.

Athlon64 X2 4400+ > Intel 3200+
256MB GeForce 7900GT > 512MB GeForce 6800 (AGP Bus)
Asus A8N-SLI Premium > Asus P4P800 SE
2GB Crucial DDR RAM > 1.5 GB DDR RAM
Windows 2000 -- Windows XP Home Edition

Except for video memory, you're bigger and better.

Thanks Draconis, it's good to have a solid comparison like that. Do you get no slowdown whatsoever?

My animal footstep noise slowdown is all fixed, but I still do get slowdowns during fight scenes and heavy forest scenes also cause it.

I wish my XP cd still worked - I'm starting to wonder whether 2000 isn't making full use of the modern hardware.

I also read a thorough comparison of Oblivion performance between 256MB and 512MB gfx cards and the upshot was that it shouldn't be making a difference as severe as this and performance would only increase in ultra complex areas at high res. I'm only running at 1280x1024 which (relatively speaking anyway!) isn't that high.

[ 04-25-2006, 07:16 PM: Message edited by: shamrock_uk ]

I have tweaked the crap out of mine if you need any tips. I am running a 6800 and I get a stable FPS 99% of the time. What settings are you using on thw video menu exactly (not the ini. just the main menu) and we could work from there. There are also one or two 'magic' tweaks that improve performance slightly without having an image hit (or having s small image hit).

Are you using some sort of sound card DR? If so, that would explain it ;)

Win2000 should not cause problems on its own, but unfortunantly it is limited by what it can do, not only that, but the drivers/apps designed for it are different from the Winxp ones.

And you are correct about the video cards, having more on board ram wont make the game run smoother, but will allow for more to be loaded at a time and can allow you to put bigger textures in there with no performance hit [img]smile.gif[/img]

But yeah, if you have a high end card and your only running 1280x1024, you should not have a problem installing the texture packs

I use this texture one too, since the games original texture pack is fugly. I have 0 problems using it and it caused no fps hit at all on a 256mb card.

Ignore my comments about the on board ram...

I am tired and realise that it makes little sense [img]tongue.gif[/img]

By the way Shamrock, another advantage for you to get winxp is that there are some great tweaks out there that allow the X2 chips to be handled far better by Windows than normal, it adds a great performance boost ;)

I will look around and see if there are similar fixes for win2k ;)

Hmm, I believe Sever has an X2 aswell, you around dude?

Thanks Hive for your many knowledgeable replies and everyone else for your suggestions, I may have a go at salvaging my WinXP cd this evening. Right now the installation halts at 4% with a really rather important .sys file that I can't reasonably skip. Disk is clean too.

Still, I'll see what dd_rescue makes of it.

Is the texture pack a volunteer effort?

Oh yeah - that page is awesome Hive! Can't wait to get home and give those mods a spin [img]smile.gif[/img]

No worries! I will expect you to return the favour when I next try Linux again :D [img]graemlins/hehe.gif[/img] (very soon)

And good luck with XP!

[img]smile.gif[/img] Look forward to it ;)

The XP cd is looking a little hammered:

Unfortunately (well, good from a recovery POV!) it drops the speed right down when negotiating errors, so I'll probably continue this overnight - taking up too much valuable playing time :D

I might try out Oblivion on PC after all. I did some online system requrement check and passed the minimum requrement by a huge margin. I almost passed the recommended requirement as well, but fell short at the finishing line. It should still run well, I hope.

I wont buy it until early June, though, as my schoolwork would most likely suffer badly if I bought it before. :D

Huzzah, despite a rather large number of errors on the disk, dd_rescue has come through for me and I'm using XP again [img]smile.gif[/img]

Going through the endless update cycle at the moment, but will re-benchmark shortly [img]smile.gif[/img]

You mentioned tweaks for X2 processors, Hive? :D