ATI FPS bug?

[blacklord9]

I have a 6870 and whenever NPCs are onscreen my fps drops to 10-20 fps. Anyone else got this problem?

I think it's graphics card related since I had the same problem on my old rig with a 4850 but the game worked flawlessly on my old 8600GT.

Any insights?

[EvenstarGW]

High poly outfits. Poorly optimised nifs. High res textures. Animating it all. Just some causes for the game to choke with a lot of characters on screen. Are you sure the circumstances were equal when you ran it on that 8600? Because it may not actually be your gpu that's slowing things down. Oblivion was just not designed to run on multicore cpu's so it doesn't make use of most of the speed improvements of modern cpu's, whereas the gpu's extra power does get used. Does lowering the screen resolution improve the situation much?

[blacklord9]

no, lowering the res does absolutely nothing. and now that you mention it oblivion doesn't use any more than 25% of my CPU (q6600)

[EvenstarGW]

Aye, on a quad core it will rarely (if ever) use any more than one core. You can try looking through the ini and enabling some of the options that mention "threaded" but apart from that, not much to be done I think. If you're running a lot of script-heavy mods, they may be slowing things down.

[beck11]

Any AA option turned on? I think CCC has a force AA setting, right? Idk, might be worth a try, if lowering res dosent improve the fps than either its something catalyst(or w/e the hell they call it now) is doing or maybe its the GPU driver. Btw, even my GTX570 chugs in this game just to put it into perspective so I wouldnt blame anything on the GPU just yet.

Also try playing around with shadows and see if it improves fps.

[blacklord9]

It would seem it's actually processor related as mentioned. I doubt there is any way to fix this.

[Dreamer102]

Oblivion is not a GPU driven game...it's mostly CPU driven.

And the stupid game only uses one core...it's how it was built at the time it was developed.

Unfortunately, the only way of getting rid of lag and chugging is to upgrade your processor/motherboard. I currently run a 2.4 dual core amd chip...I'm building a whole new PC this christmas to try and enjoy some Skyrimming next year along with being able to play Oblivion on something other than medium settings.

(Frickin stupid ass game programming...)