Oblivion:Tweaking

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Oblivion

This page is intended to show ways of tweaking the performance and stability of the game.

Contents

[edit] Game Settings

These settings in-game will help your performance:

Display Resolution -- 1024x768 is recommended as a starter resolution. It's not low enough to look grainy, and not quite high enough to significantly affect performance. This one is a personal preference thing; some people prefer raw FPS (lower resolutions), some like fantastic picture quality (higher resolutions).
Grass Draw Distance -- Grass has a very high impact on FPS. Setting the grass draw distance slider all the way low should help quite a bit. Setting the grass distance to zero also makes herbs much easier to find in the wild, and also allows prowling animals to be spotted further away.

[edit] INI Settings

See section about the Oblivion.ini file.

[edit] Windows Settings

Doing the following in Windows may help performance:

Drivers -- Upgrading your drivers can make a big difference. This applies to DirectX, your video card drivers, and your sound card drivers. Never had a game that required an update to my sound card drivers before, but Oblivion sure did! For owners of Nvidia video cards who are not running sli, try using drivers that aren't forceware 91.31 if experiencing abnormally low framerates. This release can cause slowdowns particularly in areas where water is rendered. Also, the 91.31 driver may increase the temperature of your GPU by 1-3 degrees. 84.xx drivers or modified drivers from groups such as NGO may provide better performance. Still, if you aren't encountering problems with your current drivers, sometimes it is better to avoid upgrading, due to possible decreases in performance.
Other Programs -- As always, the less other software you have running on your system, the more grunt is left for Oblivion!
Reducing Startup Programs -- go to Start>Run and type in msconfig. Change to the startup tab and uncheck anything you don't need. You'll probably want to keep antivirus and spyware programs, but not Adobe Acrobat and QuickTime preloaders. If in doubt, look for the required marker. Only one or two things should have this, the rest are entirely expendable.
Windows 2000 and XP Memory -- You can also increase performance by adding in memory to your system. Ideally, this means using a minimum of 1 Gigabyte of RAM. While Oblivion will function with less, frequent stuttering and longer load times may occur. Using programs like FreeRam XP Pro work well with Oblivion. Increasing your Virtual Memory settings may also help. This involves the use of hard drive space to cache memory. Just right click on the "My Computer" icon and select properties. Go to the advanced tab, and find the virtual memory section. It's different for each OS. For normal usage, your PC should have a setting of at least 2 Gigabytes total memory (RAM + Virtual Memory.) Thus, if you have 512 Megabytes RAM, 1.5 gigabytes of Virtual Memory should be more than adequate. You may need to reboot after making these changes.
Windows 2000 and XP Services -- You can turn off un-needed services in the Control Panel --> Administrative Tools --> Services section. Research them on a search engine before you turn them off and disable them. This could seriously screw up your system unless you know what you're doing. For an excellent services guide use this link http://www.theeldergeek.com/services_guide.htm
Windows Vista -- Right-click on your Oblivion desktop icon, find the 'Compatability' tab, and then make sure that "disable desktop composition" is ticked. Click OK to save this setting. This tweak will automatically turn off Vista's graphics-card intensive 'Aero Glass' desktop look, whenever you launch Oblivion. In Vista, with the latest NVIDIA drivers installed, you should be able to force anti-aliasing even if you've selected to play the game using HDR lighting. Independent tests have shown that Oblivion is one of the few 3D games that actually runs faster under Vista, compared to Windows XP

[edit] Overclocking

Overclocking your system is a sure way to increase performance (and often decrease stability) of Oblivion. It also significantly decreases the life of the hardware being overclocked and voids any warranties associated with the hardware. In general overclocking your system for Oblivion to the limit is not recommended, because it greatly increases the chance of a Crash To Desktop. Many of the latest (March 2008) mid-range NVIDIA graphics cards are operating very close to their maximum safe limit, and overclocking risks damage to the card and your motherboard.

Graphics card -- You can often improve performance of your low-end gfx card by 5-20% by re-enabling features from higher models disabled by the manufacturer (note, some of them can be disabled due to being faulty and causing errors/crashes after reenabling though). A card with a good cooler can go at much higher clock speeds than originally designed as well, and notching card clock up by a few percent, well within manufacturer-provided safety margins will result in improved performance without any serious drawbacks. The Guru of 3D has a collection of graphics card tweaking and tuning utilities (highly recommended: RivaTuner), graphics drivers modified and tweaked to improve performance, and forums dedicated to help concerning overclocking graphics cards.
CPU and RAM -- These have lesser impact with the game performance, though increasing the memory clock speeds can surely help, and lower-end CPUs can sometimes be a hindrance that can be avoided by overclocking. The overclocking itself is usually performed by editing corresponding settings in BIOS, which is usually motherboard-specific, but tools like Sisoft Sandra can help monitoring system performance and point out bottlenecks that should be tweaked to improve performance.
Harddrive -- While "overclocking" harddrive is not really feasible, you can make sure you use the correct controller drivers so that fastest modes of the drive are enabled and speed up the load times by defragmenting the drive the game loads from.

[edit] Common Problems

[edit] Texture Shimmering

Nvidia Graphics Cards
On Nvidia cards shimmering is most noticeable when anisotropic filtering is enabled and Image Quality is set to Performance, High Performance, or Quality mode. Textures appear to shimmer and "crawl" as you move about the game world. This is fixed by clamping Negative LOD Bias while playing Oblivion, "High Quality" mode enables negative LOD clamping by default.

[edit] Stuttering

Game stuttering (random pauses of some milliseconds up to some seconds) can have several different reasons. The first-most task is to identify what is your problem.

[edit] Wrong drivers

Can't stress this enough: Most stuttering is caused by outdated or wrong video drivers. Try the latest drivers first. Try the drivers that were shipped with the graphic card second.

[edit] Texture memory

Stuttering is often caused by loading more textures into memory than your graphics adapter can store. The system then needs to page textures in and out of memory very rapidly causing stuttering during gameplay. If you're experiencing stuttering during outdoor sequences here is a quick way to check for this problem.

Open the console by pressing ` (or tilde symbol) on your keyboard, now enter the following

setdebugtext 13 <press enter>
tdt <press enter>

Close the console (with the same button) and look in the upper left corner of your screen, you should see debug text as in this image.

TextureMem is the line we're interested in, check the end of the line for the statement T = nnn mb, if nnn is greater than the video ram on your graphics card then you've identified the cause of your stuttering. Try removing any high-res texture packs that you've installed (LOD textures, LOD normals, etc..) or using lower-resolution versions of the same (ie: use 2048x2048 textures instead of 4096x4096). If that doesn't solve the problem try setting your graphical detail one level lower, ie: use medium instead of high detail. The goal is to keep the total textures loaded in memory beneath the ram-size of your graphics adapter, otherwise you will experience stuttering as the system pages textures in and out of memory.

Increasing uGridsToLoad parameter in the INI file (see Oblivion.ini for more parameters) can cause more textures to be loaded, as more of the game area is loaded, so it is wise to leave this at the default or lower.

[edit] Audio

Try disabling audio and see whether it helps. This is especially true when your game stutters in combat or when many sound sources are around. A bad audio driver can be the reason for game pauses up to 1 minute.

Disable sound by changing the Oblivion.ini option (in Documents and Files/MyGames/Oblivion):

bMusicEnabled=0
bSoundEnabled=0

The Quiet Feet mod often solves the problem of frequent stuttering caused by enemy footsteps. If the problem has not been resolved and you are already using the latest sound driver for your (onboard) sound card, buying a better sound card is advisable.

[edit] See Also

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