@pitchflare
Aha! Your DXDIAG confirms what I suspected! You have on-board video AND sound, typical of most off-the-shelf PC's nowadays. Manufacturers like to assume the majority of PC users don't use their PC for games, so they don't bother installing a dedicated video card and dedicated sound card. By a strange coincidence, this also keeps the PC build cost as low as possible so they make MORE profit per PC.
Intel(R) G33/G31 Express Chipset Family
On-board video (ON the motherBOARD, part of the Northbridge chip). If you can't tell from the name, here are the dead give-away entries:-
Chip type: Intel(R) GMA 3100 //Supports Shader Model 2.0 (SM2.0) maximum
DAC type: Internal //Internal to Northbridge
Display Memory: 256Mb //(Dedicated + Shared)
//
//The following TWO entries will ONLY appear for on-board video chipsets...
//
Dedicated Memory: 0Mb //NO dedicated VRAM, typical of most on-board video chipsets
Shared Memory: 256Mb //Amount of System RAM to allocate, set in BIOS Setup
The GMA 3100 is not a dedicated video card with its own Video RAM (VRAM), so will be slow. It has to have System RAM allocated AS Video RAM, which means your CPU (doing AI, Physics, etc) and the GMA 3100 (3D rendering) are constantly competing to use your system's main memory bus, the Front-Side Bus (FSB). This creates an "FSB bottleneck" that slows everything down, resulting in low in-game framerates. On-board video is OK for desktop productivity (2D), but is useless for games (3D) due to the FSB bottleneck it causes.
I'd suspect your on-board video doesn't support a certain advanced aspect of 3D rendering that Oblivion is trying to do, and this is resulting in a crash. The fact that it's happening in Exterior cells seems to point to the water shader being the source of the problem. Try backing up your Oblivion.ini file then editing it to impose the following settings:-
bUseWaterShader=0
bUseWaterReflections=0
This will switch the water shader off completely (water will be a simple pink transparent surface). If the game stops crashing, the water shader is the likely culprit.
Realtek Digital Output (Realtek High Definition Audio)
Realtek are a major manufacturer of on-board sound/modem chipsets. Give-away entry for poor sound performance:-
HW Accel Level: Basic //Typical for on-board (DSP emulation via sound driver so heavy FSB usage)
Either this is the maximum hardware acceleration level for your Realtek chipset, or it's been lowered from Full. My old SoundBlaster Audigy PCI card runs in Full acceleration mode for best possible performance. In this mode, the driver emulates nothing, just sends sound data straight to the card's hardware Digital Signal Processor (DSP). When set to Basic, a LOT of what the hardware DSP does is emulated by the driver. This means a LOT of FSB usage by the CPU running driver code, a further source of FSB bottlenecking.
Recommendations
It's not surprising that you're having to run Oblivion at LOW details! Your blazing fast 64-bit quad-core PC with a massive 8Gb RAM is
CRIPPLED without dedicated video and sound cards installed for gaming performance! Upgrading to dedicated PCI-E video (with at least 512Mb VRAM) and dedicated sound (i.e. Soundblaster X-Fi) will remove that nasty FSB bottleneck. Your top-end PC will then run Oblivion as intended, with ALL settings maxed out in top-notch SM3.0 and HDR eye-candy!
My PC doesn't come anywhere NEAR the spec of yours <drooling>, but Oblivion performs reasonably well at 1366x768 in near FULL video details with Distant Landscape, HDR, Grass and Shadows enabled. I get an average 20-30fps outdoors and 40fps+ in dungeons. Some dips to 10fps in cities but at least bearable. Reason? I have dedicated video AND sound cards installed! Treat that excellent spec PC to the ESSENTIAL upgrades it deserves, my friend, and you'll having a gaming rig to boast about!
Determining the Crash Error Message
<ProgramName> has caused a problem. That's a standard Windows fatal error dialog you're seeing. It should have a Details link (underlined in blue) you can click to view the crash dump information (typically Fatal Exception followed by a code, e.g. 0xC0000005 which means Access Violation, due to one process attempting to access protected memory owned by a another process).
Hope this helps you get closer to solving the problem.
PS. Sorry about the long post. I just really, REALLY want to help you get Oblivion working at its best so you can join the "My jaw hit the floor" club!
