Oblivion Settings (Minor Tweaking Guide)

Just spent an hour or so checking different framerates on different settings. I'm quite happy when the framerate is stable between 20-30Fps. and when i suddenly got a dip to around 13 in some area i had to check that area out on different settings. The area was wilderness with a lot of trees and grass, not much else. The thing was that this area didn't look very good at all. The grass looked like s****book pastes and didnt fit the ground at all. Anyways The lappy i tested on has:

2.0 Ghz Core Duo
1Gig RAM256Mb
Radeon x1600

My usual settings.
1200x800.
Texture Quality: High
Distant land, Distant building, Distant Trees: On
Grass: - Halfway
Tree distance: 1/4
Shaddows in and out: 1/4
Soft shaddows: low
Bloom: on

Conclusions.

Changing Texture Quality didn't change the FPS at all in that area or any other area i tested in. So you might as well go with high if you have enough Video RAM

Turning off shaddows increased the FPS just a little bit, Not worth turning off if you like some shaddows on. 3rd Person view was a little more difference though since then you see your own shaddows.

Changing Resolution to 720x480 gave quite a big boost in FPS but it looked kind of ****py since it was so low and not the native resolution. Testing this i still had Texture quality at high. (you cant see the detail level at this low resolution so you might as well go with Medium or low), Then Changing Texture quality from High to medium still didnt give any FPS boost... I didn't try low though.

Turning on 4x AA at low resolution just made it all look like a fuzzy oil painting. No crispness and no contrast. Keep it off at all times if you play low resolution and dont have a top of the line Graphics card.

Turning grass off completely Gave a MAJOR fps increase in that area even at my usual settings. I'm guessing the animated grass uses huge amount of resources. I don't like the way i can se the grass pop from nowhere in the distance too so i'm concidering turning it off completely. Mostly it doesnt even look that good. I would suggest they put another sliding bar for the grass. "Grass density" would probably be better. and turning off the grass animations should be an option. (I didn't check the .ini file - maybe it's possible)

Turning on and off Bloom or HDR didn't change the FPS much. Keep it on if you like a bit of glowiness.

High Tree distance is quite useless if you play at low resolutions. Same as grass uses a lot of power. Keep it at 1/4 or Half since you wont see much of the detail in the distance anyways. And again i think the animations is a major FPS thief, not the trees themselves.

If you can you should switch on all the Distant stuff. It's quite amazing too look out over the landscape at some times. I don't actually know how much FPS they give since once when i tried them off i got very dissapointed and quickly switched it back on.

If possible play at your native Resolution and Texture Detail on high. The textures are lovely, and probably the last thing you should cut down on if you like detail.


I hope this helps a bit setting up your Oblivion. If you can keep a stable 25-35 fps you should be more than satisfied, tweaking too much just for FPS just isn't worth it either..

I'll post more here if I find some good (.ini) tweaks.

 

hey great guide!

I aslo spent hours tweaking and got the same results and conclusions as you

 

Thanks I'll keep this in mind when I get my W3J someday...

 

Thanks for the tips. A friend and I installed Oblivion on my laptop just to test it out, since his computer can barely play it.

I was running at 800x600, at "Medium" settings, and getting 60's FPS, lowest I saw was around 38-42, which is good. I would have changed the settings but there are very few options . . perhaps I didn't look in the right option panel for the settings.

 

while in game, hit ESC, thengo to options...Video..the one that pops up before the game is the standard auto detect settings, and gives you a few other choices.

pb,out.

 

in the video options you can scroll down, if thats it then dont worry cos for some reason loads of people have missed this.