I'd say it was still the CPU too, even tho the physics can be threaded, the ai forced off to another CPU and atleast on nVidia the drivers can thread some of the rendering back end the game itself is still heavy bound to a single core for some of the more intensive processing.
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570 in SLI for Oblivion
- Thread starter liscoe
- Start date
After endless testing I have come to the following conclusions:
It is the CPU that is the bottleneck- my VRAM averages around 800MB and GPU usage around 70% (increasing AA has no effect on fps) whereas CPU0 is maxed out. Running my 2600K at 4.5GHz instead of its normal 3.8GHz gives me an increase of about 10 fps. When inside (in the game) CPU usage drops to about 60% (of one core) and fps then maxes out, GPU/RAM etc stay roughly the same.
It's a shame that even the best gaming CPU out at the moment can't run this game when modded although that's Oblivions age and poor coding I suppose.
It's a combination of the 'better cites' mod and 'RAEVWD' that cripple the frame rate, I don't understand exactly why this is as I'd have thought they'd be harder on the graphics card than the processor. Also turning water reflections off improves fps dramatically (at least 10fps) and it's mainly looking at the water that causes slowdown.
I have managed to get the game to a fairly playable state with various mods including streamline/OSR (Oblivion Stutter Remover) and playing about with the .ini settings of both oblivion and OSR. The multithreading tweaks seemed to have helped a little. Does anyone know how to force threads onto different cores? Rroff (see above) you seem knowlegeable- any ideas?
FPS results are now (roughly):
Inside: 40-60 fps (max fps is 60 as linked to refresh rate through OSR)
Outside: (forest etc) 20-40 fps
Outside: (looking at water or at long distances) 15-25 fps
Cities: 30-60 fps (even with better cites)
It's actually quite playable now even at low frame rates, anything over 20 fps seems fine; in fact it’s only the city docks with lots of ships and water that reduce frame rate to unplayable levels- they reduce it to 8-12. I shall keep tweaking but suppose will have to live with it- unless I can overclock my 2600K to 6GHz..........
It is the CPU that is the bottleneck- my VRAM averages around 800MB and GPU usage around 70% (increasing AA has no effect on fps) whereas CPU0 is maxed out. Running my 2600K at 4.5GHz instead of its normal 3.8GHz gives me an increase of about 10 fps. When inside (in the game) CPU usage drops to about 60% (of one core) and fps then maxes out, GPU/RAM etc stay roughly the same.
It's a shame that even the best gaming CPU out at the moment can't run this game when modded although that's Oblivions age and poor coding I suppose.
It's a combination of the 'better cites' mod and 'RAEVWD' that cripple the frame rate, I don't understand exactly why this is as I'd have thought they'd be harder on the graphics card than the processor. Also turning water reflections off improves fps dramatically (at least 10fps) and it's mainly looking at the water that causes slowdown.
I have managed to get the game to a fairly playable state with various mods including streamline/OSR (Oblivion Stutter Remover) and playing about with the .ini settings of both oblivion and OSR. The multithreading tweaks seemed to have helped a little. Does anyone know how to force threads onto different cores? Rroff (see above) you seem knowlegeable- any ideas?
FPS results are now (roughly):
Inside: 40-60 fps (max fps is 60 as linked to refresh rate through OSR)
Outside: (forest etc) 20-40 fps
Outside: (looking at water or at long distances) 15-25 fps
Cities: 30-60 fps (even with better cites)
It's actually quite playable now even at low frame rates, anything over 20 fps seems fine; in fact it’s only the city docks with lots of ships and water that reduce frame rate to unplayable levels- they reduce it to 8-12. I shall keep tweaking but suppose will have to live with it- unless I can overclock my 2600K to 6GHz..........
Unfortunatly forcing threads onto different cores requires some fairly advanced software and usually best left for the OS to handle anyway (as its usually as effective as it gets).
Thing is a lot of the visual effects are based on older techniques rather than using pixel shaders, compute shaders, etc. so some of the effects are processed partially on the CPU as well as GPU.
A lot of the CPU based slowdown tho is due to the way the mods/game work, a lot of the game logic, etc. is probably heavily script based and doesn't really scale that well with MHz alone, you may gain some performance from newer CPUs that can process some of the instructions more efficently. What the game really needs is someone to rewrite some of the core programming with more efficent techniques - usually something that happens if/when a game becomes open source which unfortunatly doesn't happen very often.
Thing is a lot of the visual effects are based on older techniques rather than using pixel shaders, compute shaders, etc. so some of the effects are processed partially on the CPU as well as GPU.
A lot of the CPU based slowdown tho is due to the way the mods/game work, a lot of the game logic, etc. is probably heavily script based and doesn't really scale that well with MHz alone, you may gain some performance from newer CPUs that can process some of the instructions more efficently. What the game really needs is someone to rewrite some of the core programming with more efficent techniques - usually something that happens if/when a game becomes open source which unfortunatly doesn't happen very often.
You have to remember the game was targeted for for the Xbox 360, which essentially has an ATI x1900 variant as the GPU. The game was never designed to handle the massively increased polygon count added by things like RAEVWD / Better Cities, and it may be the case that the CPU was better suited for all of the culling etc and that the engine paths to offload this kind of work to the GPU simply don't exist.
My framerates are quite a bit lower than yours, and that's down to my CPU running its cores at 3.8GHz rather than 4.6GHz. (And being a generation older).
Skyrim is coming out in the twilight years of the Xbox so hopefully that platform is better understood, and they will have to make the engine much more scalable to handle current PC's - so hopefully will be better.
It's actually RAEVWD that kills the frame rate- with this uninstalled the game runs extremely smoothly everywhere. Rather annoying really but at least I've narrowed it down.
Increasing AA also cuts down the fps as you would expect (obviously you only notice this if the fps hasn't already been hamstrung by RAEVWD) so SLI may still be worth while. I've lost count of the money I've spent making this game run smoothly!
I am hoping that Skyrim will be much more optimised both for pc's and modding- they must have learnt a great deal from years of people taking Oblivion to pieces...
Increasing AA also cuts down the fps as you would expect (obviously you only notice this if the fps hasn't already been hamstrung by RAEVWD) so SLI may still be worth while. I've lost count of the money I've spent making this game run smoothly!
I am hoping that Skyrim will be much more optimised both for pc's and modding- they must have learnt a great deal from years of people taking Oblivion to pieces...
Soldato
- Joined
- 2 Dec 2006
- Posts
- 8,204
What was the point of that mod then? They brought out a mod that even a 2600k at 4.5ghz can't handle before SB was even out? So who the hell was running it?
Soldato
- Joined
- 16 Nov 2008
- Posts
- 2,925
- Location
- West Midlands
Im also looking into adding another 470 for sli to run oblivion better. Even maxxed out without nothing this game doesnt do 60pfps solid. If i add oblivion stutter remover it helps a lot. I have added a load of new shaders which reduces me to 30 to 40 fps. Add all of the mods this game will chug on my 470. So im adding another to keep up with the extra goodies.
A SSD will also stop any stutter along with stutter remover.
A SSD will also stop any stutter along with stutter remover.