Target Performance

This collection has been benchmarked at 40 FPS+ on a machine with a Core 2 Duo E6850, a Nvidia 8700M GT, and 4GB of RAM at the following locations.

• Anvil: Castle island west end, facing west towards the lighthouse.
• Bruma: North gate, walk east to the wall next to the stairs, and face south.
• Forest: Go a bit southeast of Waynon Priory and face southeast.
• Imperial City Market District: Stand at the west gate facing east.
• Starter Sewer Exit: Face out from the exit.
• Fighting 10 dremora at once.

Video Options Settings

• Turn off Blood and HDR.
• Set trees to 50%, as that costs virtually nothing. 100% costs four times more, though, so don't do that.
• Set actors, items, and objects to 50% for a good balance between gameplay and performance. Reduce actors if you need more performance; it's linear. Reducing objects gets you little performance because the impact mostly comes in the first 33%. Reducing items gets you virtually no benefit.
• Turn off grass entirely on the video settings slider, it's a performance killer. If you really must, don't push it beyond 33%, as the impact goes nonlinear.
• Set both exterior and interior shadows to 0 for a huge performance gain.
• Don't use tree canopy shadows for a 2 FPS gain.
• Set specular lighting to 0 for a large performance gain.
• Turn off blood decals entirely, they're very slow.
• Leave water reflections off, they're a performance killer.
• Leave window reflections off, not that I know where you can actually see the results.

Oblivion INI Settings

After elaborate testing on the above locations, running around, and beating up things in Vilverin, I've decided on the following INI value changes from the default. This may not be true for your video card, but it can't hurt as a start.

• Turn off vertical sync with iPresentInterval=0
• Move in the distant land cutoff with uGridDistantCount=10
• Move in the distant tree cutoff with uGridDistantTreeRange=10
• Hi-resolution water has no effect with the included water mod but slows things down, so turn it off with bUseWaterHiRes=0
• Water ripples have no effect with the included water mod but slow things down, so turn them off with bUseWaterDisplacements=0
• Lower the density of grass clumps and performance impact of grass with iMinGrassSize=160
• To be especially tricky and get a big performance gain use fSpecularLOD2=1.0000 . Unlike changing DoSpecularPass, this will virtually turn off specular without introducing crash bugs. Note the value will reset if you option the video options menu, so don't do that.

Dual Core Settings

By default, the included INI is set up for a dual-core CPU. The following changes were made for that and appear to greatly reduce stuttering.

• Change iNumHavokThreads from 1 to 3.
• Change iThreads from 3 to 10.
• Change iOpenMPLevel from 10 to 25.

Streamline INI Settings

The included sl.ini only enables stream saving for autosave handling and stream purging to clean out the texture memory more efficiently. You probably don't need the FPS smoothing or stream sight distant fog features.

It's still not fast enough!

• Give up on distant land and mess around with Streamline as documented in !Mod Documentation\03-Patches
• Track your texture memory with the console.
• Disable dynamic light sources by setting fLightLOD2=0.0001 and fLightLOD1=0.0000

Some unexpectedly slow mods

Mods that add a global hook to all actors and constantly check for something are surprisingly performance intensive. I found these otherwise fantastic to have the performance impact listed at around 40FPS. I'd like to include them, but they're just too slow.

• Cats and Rats: 2 FPS
• Dungeon Actors Have Torches: 3 FPS
• Exterior Actors Have Torches: 3 FPS
• Reneers Corpse Mod: 1 FPS
• Reneers Guard Overhaul: 5 FPS
• Supreme Magicka: 3 FPS

I made an exemption for Supreme Magicka because it's too cool to pass up, but man, what are they doing in there?

256mb video cards

If you have less than 512mb texture memory on your video card, you have your work cut out for you.

1. Remove the REM before QTP3-Reduced-Max in Install04QTP.bat for -50mb texture memory usage.
2. Try removing the installation of everything but the Grass and Lava items in Install05World.bat.
3. Try removing the installation of Install09TexturesCharacters.bat and Install10TexturesItems.bat.
4. Turn off distant land and buildings.

References Used

• Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Tweak Guide
• ballofflame - The Oblivion Performance Project