Oblivion Low FPS on good machine

[Soarinace]

Hi I recently bought Oblivion GOTY from steam and on full graphics I only run at around 20fps
My pc is AMD phenom II x4 3.20ghz
8gb Ram
Ati radeon HD 5770 1gb

[Logius]

What OS are you using? I've heard that Vista has problems running Oblivion.

[Soarinace]

Ah windows 7 ultimate forgot to say that
Also oblivions default configuration for graphics puts it at very low quality!?

[Master of Puppets]

Did you try using the command "tlb"?

It makes everything brighter, but it gives a performance boost.

[Shady Sam]

thats really odd your system rocks I dont see how it couldnt run oblivion well I run oblivion on a HP pavillion with an AMD athlon II 640 quad core 3.0 GHz ATI radeon 4200 and with 4 GB of RAM on high with no lag?

[maurits]

I got a the sort of the same problem, low FPS and many drops in framerate
Even if I put the sliders to the middle the FPS are around 30, and drop constantly to 17-20.

AMD Athleon X3 445 3.1 Ghz
4gb ram
Windows 7
Sapphire radeon HD 6770 1gb (=rebranded 5770)

It might be this problem:
Game Mistakes Newer Hardware's Capabilities
When Oblivion is first run, it attempts to autodetect the maximum Shader Model and Shader Package the video card is capable of using -> http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Tweaking
But the solution requires you to change some things in the game-map...and that's not possible with steam

I'm searching for a solution: if I find something, I will report it.

[H8Ball]

Hi,

Oblivion is a DirectX 9.0c (DX9) game that supports Shader Model 2.0 (SM2.0), with limited support for DX9 SM3.0 since those video cards (Geforce 6000 series) had recently hit the market when the game was released. Nowadays, modern video cards support DX10 SM4.0 and DX11 SM5.0. All DX and SM versions are backwards compatible with all earlier versions, so DX11 also supports DX10, 9, 8 and so on, and an SM5.0 card also supports SM4.0, 3.0, 2.0 and 1.x. If you have a video card that supports SM3.0, you can edit Oblivion.ini as follows...

;Prettier gloss on hair
bAllow20HairShader=1

;Permits SM3.0 shaders (doesn't force them though - see note below)
bAllow30Shaders=1

;Performance boost for nVidia cards - Leave at 0 for ATI cards
bAllowPartialPrecision=1

;Forces SM1.x shaders if your video chipset doesn't support SM2.0 or has REALLY slow SM2.0 shaders (Geforce FX series)
;Warning: Causes crash if any SM2.0 or SM3.0 related settings are enabled!
bForce1XShaders=0

;Transparent ripple effect used for Oblivion Gates & Chameleon - Set to 0 if framerates drop drastically around Oblivion gates
bUseRefractionShader=1

;Use faster SM2.0 shaders for lighting
bHighQuality20Lighting=1

Note: There's a problem with Oblivion auto-detecting newer video cards as having lower Shader Model support than they they actually have. For example, it may detect an SM3.0 or higher card as only supporting SM2.0 or even only SM1.x! Even after forcing the Oblivion.ini settings for SM2.0 and SM3.0 support, the game might still use ONLY SM2.0! You can FORCE it to use SM3.0 shaders as follows...

1. Set Oblivion's Video Options for the highest eye candy possible.
2. Load your latest savegame to get into 3D rendering mode, then exit (this writes out a RenderInfo.txt file).
3. Open the RenderInfo.txt file (in My Documents\My Games\Oblivion) and read the Shader Package number at the bottom. Mine reads 13 (SM2.0), so I'll use that as an example.
4. Go to the Oblivion\Data\Shaders folder and rename ShaderPackage013.sdp to ShaderPackage013.sdp.bak.
5. Make a copy of ShaderPackage019.sdp (full SM3.0) and rename it to ShaderPackage013.sdp.

Oblivion is now fooled into "thinking" it's using package 13 (SM2.0), but it's actually using package 19 (full SM3.0), the highest revision available at the time! If your package is 7, for example, then rename package 7 and replace it with a copy of package 19 renamed to 7.

SM3.0 shaders are faster and more efficient because there are single SM3.0 shader instructions that do the job of multiple SM2.0 instructions, making for shorter and faster running vertex and pixel shader programs.

Your mileage may vary with this "tweak". It might drastically improve framerates, or make NO difference whatsoever. I only get about 1~2fps boost from it, and even that might just be my imagination playing tricks. Oblivion's Gamebryo 3D engine is the newer version of Morrowind's Netimmerse 3D engine and suffers from the same fundamental flaw. It relies TOO heavily on the CPU for 3D calculations and can only use a single core on a multi-core CPU. If your CPU clock speed is low, there's NO benefit because the CPU is the bottleneck, not the shaders. The faster the FSB (Front Side Bus), the better, so 1GHz Hypertransport is better than 400MHz DDR, but CPU clock speed is still the MOST major factor governing framerates.

Oblivion and Morrowind are "CPU-Bound" games. Other games like Doom 3 (IDTech4 3D engine) are "Graphics-Bound", relying much more on video card speed than CPU speed. Doom 3 on my system runs at a stonking 40~60fps solid without much tweaking compared to Oblivion's paltry 10~30fps after extensive tweaking and mesh optimisations!

I'm assuming the intense CPU-Bound dependence is why Bethesda have moved away from Gamebryo and have apparently written their OWN proprietary 3D engine from scratch for Skyrim. Hopefully, it'll live up to the expectations by taking full advantage of 64-bit multi-core CPU's and DX11 SM5.0, but also being fully scaleable for older systems like mine which is only 32-bit single-core and DX9 SM3.0.

Hope this helps.