A simple guide to optimizing Oblivion


Recommended Posts

A SIMPLE GUIDE TO OPTIMIZING PERFORMANCE FOR THE ELDER SCROLLS IV: OBLIVION

Last update: September 20, 2007

The following advice are presented in order of relevance. So, 1 is more important than 2, etc.

1. WINDOWS OPTIMIZATION

First thing you should do is to follow this guide to Optimizing XP. I have seen dozens of guide to pseudo-optimizations and most of them are inefficient. This guide only presents meaningful, efficient little things you can do that can drastically optimize the performance of your PC. This will have a major effect on basically everything you do with your computer.

2. VIDEO CARD OVERCLOCKING

Secondly, you should consider overclocking your video card. Depending on the video card you use, this can reap good benefits or not. Some cards are notably good overclockers, like the 7900GS, or X850Pro, while some can't achieve much, like my actual X800XL.

For ATI cards, a nice overclocking utility is ATI Tray Tools. It'll make your life so much easier. ATI Tray Tools.

For NVidia cards, Rivatuner has the best reputation, although I don't currently own an nVidia card and didn't get the occasion to test it.

Both are easy and intuitive to use, but you should always be very careful about overclocking, and take the time to read a comprehensive guide such as this one.

3. OBLIVION TWEAKS

Then, there is some tweaking we can do in Oblivion.

a) Oblivion launcher options and in-game video options:

I'll leave some up to your experimenting, since all pcs are different. However, in order to optimize your framerate, try changing your options according to the list provided here, one at a time, until you find a comfortable setting.

1. VSync OFF. VSync reduces image tearing, but this is generally a secondary concern. It can have drastic consequences on framerate.

2. Water quality on NORMAL. It is hard to see any difference between normal and high water rendering, except in the framerate.

3. Resolution: between 1280x1024 and 800x600. Middle-range cards and lower have a really hard time with high resolutions. This can absolutely kill your performance. With a little antialiasing, a lower resolution can be just as good and with a major boost in framerate.

4. Textures on MEDIUM. This is advised on all video cards 256 MB or less. It was often pointed out that playing Oblivion for a long time with high textures is overkill for 256MB video cards. Medium textures look just as good as long as you're not looking up too close.

5. Anti-aliasing 4X, 2X or OFF. Above 4X, Antialiasing does nothing except slowing down your computer. At 2X, it's already a major improvement over none, and most video cards can do this almost "for free" (with no framerate hit). Of course, if you really have low-end hardware, then turning it off altogether will improve performance even more, although at a significant quality hit.

6. Very little or no grass. Even on high-end video cards like the X1950XT, Oblivion's default grass is an fps killer. However, there are ways to optimize its rendering, as we will discuss below. So before you reduce your grass, try the other options at the end of this guide.

7. Shadows on self/Shadows on grass/Tree canopy shadows/Ext Shadows/Int shadows OFF. Shadows are easy to ignore and are often a major fps killer.

8. Specular distance at 40% or lower. I did some testing and specular lightning doesn't seem to change much, except making shiny surfaces somehow even more shiny. For the fps cost, it's not necessarly worth it.

9. Blood decals on LOW or OFF. Minor detail that can slow you down even more in combat.

10. Window reflections OFF. All kinds of reflections involve rendering stuff twice, which is always taxing on the video card.

b) Oblivion.ini

This file is NOT located in your Program Files/Oblivion directory but rather in My Documents/My Games/oblivion.ini. Double-click on it and then find and edit the following lines. As the oblivion.ini is a long text file, CTRL-F is your friend.

bUse Joystick=0 (leave to 1 if you are actually using a joystick)

bUseRefractionShader=0 (especially true on low-end ATI cards. This will lead to strange artifacts for spell effects, be warned.)

bPreemptivelyUnloadCells=1 (leave at 0 if you have 1GB of RAM or more)

bSelectivePurgeUnusedOnFastTravel=1 (leave at 0 if you have 1GB of RAM or more)

bBackgroundLoadLipFiles=1

bLoadBackgroundFaceGen=1

bBackgroundCellLoads=1

bLoadHelmetsInBackground=1

iBackgroundLoadLoading=1

bBackgroundPathing=1

If your processor is a dual-core or supports hyperthreading, edit the following lines as such:

bUseThreadedBlood=1

bUseThreadedMorpher=1

bUseThreadedTempEffects=1

bUseThreadedParticleSystem=1

bUseMultiThreadedTrees=1

bUseMultiThreadedFaceGen=1

iNumHavokThreads=5

iThreads=9

iOpenMPLevel=10

If enabling grass doesn't kill your framerate, or if you can't live without grass (that sounds very wrong), optimize it:

iMinGrassSize=130 (you can try a higher value: 150, 180, 200)

Blanking the following will prevent all the startup movies from loading into the memory, thus reducing memory usage and speeding up Oblivion on the startup:

SMainMenuMovieIntro=

SIntroSequence=

Disabling the animated map in the main menu can increase mouse responsiveness:

SMainMenuMovie=

Finally, disabling music frees up the CPU somewhat, and some people really prefer playing the game without music, so they can enjoy all the ambient sounds.

bmusicenabled=0

4. MODS

Again, in order of relevance.

Streamline: Oblivion is reputated for bad memoy management. This awesome program will clean the memory intelligently, resulting in significantly reduced stutter for everyone!

Low Poly Grass: This mod replaces the 20-poly grass mesh with an 8 poly one, effectively reducing the graphical load presented by grass by more than 50%! This works wonders on most systems. A lot of people actually prefer the simpler mesh for aesthetical reasons too. If you're looking for maximum performance at all costs, search for a 4-polygon version, called Low-Low poly grass. It looks extremely simplistic though.

Quiet feet: Having a sound playing for each of the four paws of each animal around you (including your own horse!), especially if they're all running at the same time, can totally bog down the CPU. This mod simply removes this sound.

Operation Optimization: Similar to low-poly grass, this mods replaces many meshes with low-poly ones, that look just as good. I haven't have the occasion to test it personaly, but it has been said to improve the framerate in some areas.

De-Parallaxer: This removes parallax mapping on most textures, thus making them appear more flat. I've not been able to see much improvement in framerate with this, but that's maybe because I was more bottlenecked by fill rate than anything else. Depending on the video card you use, it could help.

Edited by Dr_Asik
  • 1 year later...

This guide was in serious need of an update so here goes. It's not really for low-end systems, anyone should read this, so I removed the "This is for low-end systems" explanations. Tweaked recommandations, added descriptions, and now there are a few good mods for optimizing performance also.

  • 2 months later...
This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
  • Posts

    • I wish one of the windows updates hadn't broken glass. Is there a workaround for that I'm not aware of?
    • OpenAI announces o3 Pro, its most intelligent reasoning model by Pradeep Viswanathan OpenAI today announced o3-pro, its flagship reasoning model that uses more compute to "think harder" and provide consistently better answers. This new model will be replacing o1-pro in ChatGPT since it consistently performs better in math, science, and coding. To help everyone make the most out of the model, o3-pro supports tool calling. So, based on the user prompt, the model can do a web search, analyze files, reason about visual inputs, use Python, personalize responses using memory, and more. This is a big improvement over o1-pro, which lacked access to tools. But the downside is that o3-pro will take more time to respond. OpenAI recommends users use o3-pro in cases where reliability matters more than speed. According to OpenAI's evaluations, users consistently preferred o3-pro's responses over o3 in key domains like science, education, programming, business, and writing help. o3-pro was also rated consistently higher for clarity, comprehensiveness, instruction-following, and accuracy. The new o3-pro model is available in ChatGPT's model picker for Pro and Team. ChatGPT's Enterprise and Edu users will get access to this latest model next week. For developers, the o3-pro model comes with a 200,000 context window and is priced at $20 per million input tokens and $80 per million output tokens. OpenAI recommends developers use background mode with o3-pro to prevent timeouts. And the model has a May 31, 2024 knowledge cutoff. The OpenAI team also noted the following as the current limitations of the o3-pro model: At the moment, temporary chats are disabled for o3-pro as we resolve a technical issue. Image generation is not supported within o3-pro—please use GPT-4o, OpenAI o3, or OpenAI o4-mini to generate images. Canvas is also currently not supported within o3-pro. As OpenAI continues to refine its models, the balance between speed and reliability will likely remain a key consideration for users choosing the right tool for their needs.
    • What annoys me is updates take forever to install on my Pixel 9 Pro XL, it was never so slow on my Samsung devices.
  • Recent Achievements

    • Reacting Well
      rshit earned a badge
      Reacting Well
    • Reacting Well
      Alan- earned a badge
      Reacting Well
    • Week One Done
      IAMFLUXX earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • One Month Later
      Æhund earned a badge
      One Month Later
    • One Month Later
      CoolRaoul earned a badge
      One Month Later
  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      542
    2. 2
      ATLien_0
      269
    3. 3
      +FloatingFatMan
      209
    4. 4
      +Edouard
      203
    5. 5
      snowy owl
      140
  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!