Tweakguides' Oblivion Tweak Guide is a regularly updated tweak guide for Oblivion.

This article explains many lines of the Oblivion.ini file you can change to either improve the visual quality, performance, or something else.

Both high and and low end machines can take advantage of these tweaks.

It also has screenshots which show what the different game settings do and change in the game.

And there's more. Just go there and start tweaking!

this is a great page! thanks

Wow. That helped a lot, I upped my resolution and made the game look better, there.

Thanks for finding that!

Wow, this looks handy. Thanks Pov. ^^ Pin-worthy, methinks.

there are some parts of the .ini file i just can't find

iPreloadSizeLimit=26214400

among others. my .ini fil is called oblivion_default.ini

am i doing something wrong? can anyone help?

There are two .ini files - the _default one in Program Files\Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion, and one in My Documents\Games\Oblivion. It's the latter you should modify.

If you open the .ini in a text editor you should be able to search for any terms you can't find.

Followed the guide for low-medium settings and my game locks up and crashes every 20 minutes.

thanks theta

Here's a major suggestion for anyone using an ATi card(I'm using a Sapphire Radeon X1600 Pro 512, for instance): Grab and use ATi Tray Tools. You will NOT regret it!

AA 6x enabled through Oblivion: getting ~30 frames in dungeons.
AA 6x enabled through ATi Tray Tools(disabling the application-specific setting): Getting ~40 frames in the same dungeons.

And it doesn't disable taking screenshots in the game! (sorry for posting some of this to the screenshot topic as well.. it applies to both, since I'm getting 10-20 frames more using the driver-level AA, compared to the game-level AA)

Just did an actual performance test with the ATi Tray Tools software(Hardware> overlocking settings> bench) and the performance difference is absolutely freaking astounding! o.o

Without AA: 1881.77
With AA 6x: 3476.85

And to compare it to other cards, the Radeon X800 Pro, which has far more graphics power overall than the X1600 Pro, scores 3558.41.
The rating for the X1600 XT, which is the higher level version of the X1600, only scores a 2671.15 on the benchmark. Which means that by enabling hardware-level AA x6, you're almost doubling your performance.

And no, I'm not overclocking at all.

Hey, i used the guide and it made my GeForce 6600 256MB run it on 1280x1024 resolution with everything on nearly full (except grass on lowest view and no antialiesing)

Defenetely Pin-Worthy

EDIT: Removed that link. Looked highly suspicious to me.

Erm... I found the one in My Documents... But when I open it in wordpad it is blank. WTF!?
Can someone throw me a bone?



Need Help!
<BUMP>

I think in order for the Oblivion ini in My Documents to be properly created, you need to start a new game first (if this is a fresh install). Then the ini file will be created in the My Documents directory.

Would this help the flickering/vanishing 1st person sword-shield-torch issue I have?

great, not 56k friendly

I can't get broadband due to phone line.

If you want to add more to your post, you can use the edit button. Please don't double post, thanks. ^^

You're right though, that article page does seem to be rather broadband biased.

hi im having problems with my 7800gs 256mb agp card and i am having frame drops, smooth frame rates right at get go, but when moving around, frame's drops for 30 secs, then averything is fine. Anybody have a camera fix, or a mod that will fix this anoying bug.

I also used the ini tweaker, but nothing happened. link here
http://www.tessource.net/files/cache/1937.html

specs

AMD 3800 duel core overclocked to 2750 Mhz.
windows xp 64bit & home
ASUS motherboard model scratch's head
water cooled down to 23c
hard drive seagate 400gb
hp dvdrw drive 52x

i hope this infomation helps..

All of the suggestions in this thread are decent, but I'd like to point out the most overlooked problem that all of these "next generation games" suffer from:

Hard drive thrashing and bottlenecks.

The fastest video card, the most overclocked memory and CPU, the most tricked-out file tweaks... none of those juicy little strategies will do you very much good if your system spends time waiting for a bunch of disk-swapping to finish.

You can test this problem on your own computer. Load up a system-intensive game like Oblivion, then fast travel right away to a new, outdoor area. Now, without moving forward or backward, spin your character around in a full 360-degree circle on-axis. Most people will notice a few hangs or pauses of varying severity, as their character's FOV rotates and new scenery comes into view. This is due to the enormous amount of data being shuttled back-and-forth between your hard drive and the rest of your system. The higher your graphical settings are, the more severe this problem will be. It's an enormous amount of data and it all has to be loaded from compressed files on your hard disk... on the fly.

Now, without moving, spin your character once again in the same place. You'll likely see no such pauses or hangs this time, or they'll at least be greatly diminished as compared to the first time. Why..? Because that scene (and its associated data) is now loaded into fast memory and is mainly being rendered from there.

As soon as you change your character's location, this proceess begins all over again. We've all seen the negative effect that this ongoing process has upon framerates and gameplay, as we run across the Oblivion landscape from one town or fort to another. Changing the settings in Oblivion.ini like "GridsToLoad" and so forth can help a little with this issue, but they are by no means the best approach to the problem.

Unfortunately, the actual "fix" for this issue is both expensive and time-consuming...

Setting up your system to run on a PAIR of very fast SATA hard drives is the first step towards alleviating this problem of massive disk swapping (and its resulting bottlenecks). Those drives should then be configured as a RAID 0 array. Oblivion and your other games should be run entirely from that array. By having a pair of drives operating in tandem, the data can be swapped back and forth at an enormously faster rate and your gameplay will be incredibly improved overall.

Here's an example of a gaming rig that I've recently built. This system takes these issues into account and should provide an example of what to shoot for. It is by no means "the ideal mega-system," but is merely being presented as a general guideline:

http://tessmage.com/tessforum/viewtopic.php?t=228

So... before anyone trots down to the store and plunks down a wad of cash on the latest video card... and before you burn up your computer by massively overclocking everything to death... take a look at your harddrives and think twice about where to spend your money.


- Tessera -

I have to say, that is some excellent advice there Tessera. Thanks! I've copied it down and will keep it in mind next time my computer needs rebuilding. ^^

I use the same graphic card as you mate, its a heaping pile of trash not much better than a 6800 and handles overclock setting even small ones crappy, Mine beeps like a dam cricket for no reason sometimes and a lot of time won't execpt new 7800 series driver updates,my system is a much weaker 2800 uni amd best I found for runnin oblivion is kill the backround pic on my computer, install oldblivion, set windows to classic visual style and use a decent prog that can clean out the temps and watnot, as for settings I alwasy kill the grass with the console command 'tg set all decals and visual properties down, here are the settings I am able/unwilling to change, Distance building/landscape, texture large, 1024x 768 res, trees objects and actors maxed. I also use oldblivion to dissemble most of the shaders in the game. With that I am able to use 150 mods to deck the world out. I am interested in wat these little tweaks can help now that I am down to my 50 mods I refuse/will never play with out active and a fresh install. but as for that card unclock it and leave it alone best advice I can give through experience, sadly If i had waited 1 more week I would have had the money to buy a 7900 or 8800 for the 6700 duo core vivo I did not have at the time, so atm I have a piece of crap card for my 5 year old comp that sounds like its going into hyperdrive when I turn it on and a new comp that is near worthless to me. ^^

edit: as for temperature dint help me too much the card is suppose to handle 115c mine never went above 45c even when clocked to max with oblvion running on highest settings, when clocked even just slightly I got that annoying lag that tessera noted

This is indeed some great information. I was perusing through the links however, and 8 of the 10 I click on were no longer valid. Does anyone have an updated list of the links(or their better replacements by now)? I'd love to get it. Plan on downloading them and burning a copy to DVD so I don't have to go through the hassle for older ones anymore, just for new mods.

Thanks for the help.

This thread is about 2 years old and needs to be updated. My favorite site for optimizing Oblivion and many other optimizations - graphic cards, general PC some other games is this one.

http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_1.html

He updates it regularly and has some very good advice.

I've been using that one too, actually. I think I'll replace the Optimising Oblivion one with that.

I'll do it tomorrow I think, too lazy now.

The tweakguides link is very informative and a great read, thanks bben46

I must say that I used Nvidia control panel last night searched for Oblivion.exe and started to put everything on max to stress my system and see what it looked like. Wow pleasantly surprised now the game looks amazing with HDR and full anti aliasing set to max, and it didn't really seem to affect my perfofmance on FPS. If you have a Nvidia card I suggest you tweak around with the control panel settings, I also did this with Half Life 2 and now it looks tremendous... Praise Nvidia

Hello Everyone, I'm hoping someone can help me. When looking through the tweak guides looking for ways to help the game run better I am finding that certain bits are missing in the INI (my documents) file, such as iPreloadSizeLimit just to name one is there anyway to get the game/computer to put it in.
I have tried clean installs, deleting the INI file but it still is the same with missing info.

I find that using the edit function to find things in the ini file will miss a lot
of settings. If the edit function says no can find. Then you may still find what you
are looking for the hard way - section by section, line by line.