[Velvet Ghost]

I'm running Oblivion on a (Dell Inspiron 1520) laptop with the following specs:

1. T300 (2 Ghz) C2D processor.
2. 8600M GT 256MB GPU sharing another 256MB system RAM
3. 1 GB 667Mhz DDR2 RAM
4. Onboard sound
5. 256MB flashdrive (ReadyBoost)

The software environment is as follows:

1. Windows Vista Basic, but with all bells and whistles disabled, unnecessary services stopped, themes disabled, etc - system fully optimized for gaming.
2. Minor / gameplay mods installed, but no major mods or texture packs.
3. Latest nVidia forceware (169.17) and latest updates for Vista, all drivers etc - everything upto date.
4. Hard disk defragmented and optimized.

In running Oblivion with the following settings:

1. High preset (with large textures)
3. 2xAA (enabled in nVidia panel) , HDR enabled
3. INI file optimized according to the TOPP guide (multithreading enabled but iPreload kept default, etc)
4. 1440x900 resolution (native LCD resolution)

My problem is that the game is stuttering every few seconds while moving or looking around outdoors, especially while running or riding a horse. I get atleast 20-25 fps outdoors but this suddenly drops to 5-10 fps during the stutter. As far as I know, this problem occurs when the GPU has insufficient VRAM. However, with no texture packs installed this shouldn't be a problem with my card!

I've tried most of the 'fixes' on the internet such as DISABLING ALL SOUND, using the 'operation optimization' mod, even reducing grass distance and shadows - nothing has worked. Other games run smoothly on my system, even Crysis! (at medium settings)

I'd really appreciate some help, I can't seem to fix this problem. Thanks in advance.

 

[pharoah]

oblivion is a memory hog bad!i use 2 gigs of system ram ive seen oblivion use nearly all of it.id say for that game is lack of ram.you could lower the resolution a bit,or add memory.

 

[Velvet Ghost]

oblivion is a memory hog bad!i use 2 gigs of system ram ive seen oblivion use nearly all of it.id say for that game is lack of ram.you could lower the resolution a bit,or add memory.

Thanks. Anybody has any other ideas?

 

[Aus_Karlos]

An extra 1gb of RAM will help, a lot... Make sure the new RAM matches the current one as problems may arise.

 

[koala]

Try playing with anti-aliasing disabled. 2xAA uses alot of video memory and is not recommended for laptops using shared system RAM.

In the nvidia control panel disable AA, or set it to 'application controlled' and then disable AA in the Oblivion graphics options. This is because the nvidia control panel overrules in-game settings, so it's best to have everything in there set to 'application controlled'. Also, try using the less demanding Bloom instead of HDR.

There are tweaks you can make to the Oblivion config file and in-game settings that will help speed things up while keeping the graphics quality high. I think the games team might be able to help you more with this, I remember seeing a thread about Oblivion tweaks recently that helped me, but can't find it now.

 

[Velvet Ghost]

Try playing with anti-aliasing disabled. 2xAA uses alot of video memory and is not recommended for laptops using shared system RAM.

In the nvidia control panel disable AA, or set it to 'application controlled' and then disable AA in the Oblivion graphics options. This is because the nvidia control panel overrules in-game settings, so it's best to have everything in there set to 'application controlled'. Also, try using the less demanding Bloom instead of HDR.

There are tweaks you can make to the Oblivion config file and in-game settings that will help speed things up while keeping the graphics quality high. I think the games team might be able to help you more with this, I remember seeing a thread about Oblivion tweaks recently that helped me, but can't find it now.

Thanks for responding.

My VRAM is not entirely shared - I have a solid 256MB DEDICATED vram! (and another 256MB shared). I tried removing the AA. The FPS improves further, but the stuttering problem remains largely unsolved. Same if I disable HDR and enable Bloom. My FPS is not a problem anyway. When the game is not stuttering I get 20-25fps with both 2xAA and HDR, which is playable by my standards in Oblivion. I've already applied tweaks from a reliable source (the TOPP guide), but it hasn't helped much.

 

[Velvet Ghost]

Well, it looks like it's an issue of insufficient RAM. While playing the game, I had only 7MB RAM left out of 1GB and my pagefile usage was 1436MB out of 2048MB. Coudn't check the VRAM usage. RivaTuner can do this under XP, but not under Vista because of something called memory virtualization (it told me that). I crippled Vista further by disabling more services and killing even more processes, then I used a 1GB flash drive as ReadyBoost. The moment I put in the flash drive, around 200MB of memory was freed. After this, the stuttering reduced to something close to reasonable. I can't buy more RAM at the moment, so I'm thinking of switching to XP, since that would leave more RAM to oblivion.exe.

 

[koala]

Good idea. Let us know if you need any help setting up a dual-boot system.

Have you tried increasing the swap file size or disabling Ready Boost?

Is your swap file located on the same drive as Windows and Oblivion?

 

[Velvet Ghost]

I can set up a dual-boot on my own, but thanks for offering to help. I wouldn't want to disable ReadyBoost! As I mentioned in the above post, ReadyBoost is actually helping me by using the (faster) flash drive instead of the pagefile and is reducing the stuttering quite a bit. Yes, the swap is located on the same drive - I have only one (120GB) HDD.