Have you tried the Oblivion Tweak Guide. I have a system similar to yours (although only 256MB video card) and have been amazed at how slowly the game runs on occasion. I have not had the time to go through all the tweak guides yet but will soon - I am hoping I can significantly improve my machines performance.

I have no idea how people with P4s can run this game, it must be a painful and frustrating experience.

Vsync is basically a useless waste of assets....if you read the documentation that comes with Oblivion, Bethesda even states as much. It is in the readme on the disc.

Morrowind also had the same information, that for almost all vsync causes choppiness and stuttering.


This is what the readme for SI says for preformance tuning:

There are several things you can do to increase game performance.

-Make sure you have no other programs running in the background.

-Lower the game resolution. The game runs faster at 640x480 and 800x600.

-Go to your Options menu and select Video. Try the following options to improve performance:
-Set View Distance as low as possible. Your framerate and load times will improve but you will not be able to view as far.

-Set Tree, Actor, Item and Object Fade as low as possible. This will cause certain objects in the world to fade away sooner. This will increase your framerate but degrade visual quality.

-Set Texture Size to Medium or Small. Textures on objects will not appear as sharp when this setting is reduced. This will increase your framerate but degrade visual quality.

-Set Grass slider as low as possible. This will cause less grass to be displayed around your character. This will increase your framerate but you will see less grass displayed.

-Set Distant LOD to OFF. This will reduce your view distance, but your framerate and load times will improve.

-Set Distant Buildings to OFF. You will not see cities or the Imperial City in the distant landscape but your framerate and load times will improve.

-Set Distant Trees to OFF. You will not see trees in the distant landscape but your framerate and load times will improve.

-Set Interior Shadows as low as possible. This will decrease the number of characters that cast shadows while you are in interiors, improving your framerate.

-Set Exterior Shadows as low as possible. This will decrease the number of characters that cast shadows while you are in exteriors, improving your framerate.

-Set Self Shadows to OFF. The Player and other characters will no longer cast shadows on themselves, but will still cast shadows on the environment. This will improve your framerate.

-Set Grass Shadows to OFF. Shadows will no longer display on grass. This will improve your framerate.

-Set Tree Canopy Shadows to OFF. The forests will no longer cast shadows on the landscape, improving your framerate.

-Set Shadow Filtering as low as possible or off. This will reduce the amount of softening the shadows receive, but increase framerate.

-Set Specular Light as low as possible. This will cause objects to lose their shininess at lower distances, improving your framerate.

-Set HDR Lighting to OFF. This will increase your framerate but degrade visual quality.

-Use Bloom lighting instead of HDR, or turn Bloom off. Bloom is a less intensive version of HDR. Turning it off will improve framerate but degrade visual quality.

-Make sure Water Detail is set to Normal. High detail water will decrease your framerate.

-Set Water Reflections and Ripples to OFF. This will increase your framerate while you are near water, but the water will not show reflections or react to objects interacting with it.

-Set Window Reflections to Off. This will remove the subtle reflections from windows but improve framerate.

-Set Blood Decals to Medium or Low. At Medium, decals do not get applied to characters, only landscape. At Low, no decals get applied at all. These will increase your framerate in combat situations.

-Turn anti-aliasing down or off. This will degrade overall visual quality but improve your framerate.

-Turn off music
The music is mp3 format and can slow the game down.


Hope this helps.

The last one is important, music eats up memory like a mother. change this setting in the ini file:

bMusicEnabled=1 change to

bMusicEnabled=0

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 -

Have you tried the Oblivion Tweak Guide. I have a system similar to yours (although only 256MB video card) and have been amazed at how slowly the game runs on occasion. I have not had the time to go through all the tweak guides yet but will soon - I am hoping I can significantly improve my machines performance.

I have no idea how people with P4s can run this game, it must be a painful and frustrating experience.