Oblivion Stuttering on XPS M1710

Hi All

This site was recommended to me by a friend. I have recently pruchased a XPS M1710 2.16GHz, 2GB Ram with the 7900 GTX.

I've been playing Oblivion on it, at a steady rate of 30 fps when outdoors (Only just recently checked this). However, everytime I use a horse, the frame-rate drops horribly to 5-6fps. The only visible program I have running at the same time is McAffee that came installed with the system. Since I've read reviews of people running this game at high resolutions and extremely high settings, this has become an extremely confusing problem.

I run the game at a resolution of 1024x768 with the View distance on full, HDR on and other settings on the higher end but not maxed out. Any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated.

I have upgraded the game and the graphics card with the latest drivers available.

Thanks in advance!

- Ray

Turning in-game settings down didn't help at all, but the defrag helped quite a bit. I was a bit worried about turnong the sound accel. down because I've read that effects the sound quality in quite a noticeable manner.

I don't really experience any problems other than on the horse though, the rest of it runs smoothly enough I guess, if not fabulously on nearly maxed out settings + max view distance and max spec.distance.

I've kept my resolution at 1024 though since anything higher didn't really look all that much better.

Was afraid of tweaking too much, but changed the following things in my ini file, and that helped quite a bit! -
Multithreading it -

bUseThreadedBlood=1
bUseThreadedMorpher=1
bUseThreadedTempEffects=1
bUseThreadedParticleSystem=1
bUseMultiThreadedTrees=1
bUseMultiThreadedFaceGen=1
iNumHavokThreads=5
iThreads=9
iOpenMPLevel=10

From Tweak-guides -

"Memory -
uInterior Cell Buffer=3

uExterior Cell Buffer=36


The above values determine how many cells (whether for interior or exterior areas) are buffered into RAM. Note that usually the value of the Exterior Cell Buffer variable is automatically set by the engine based on the size of the uGridstoLoad variable. The higher that variable is, the higher the engine will raise this value. However if you want to smooth out your FPS, try manually setting a higher value for both of these, depending on how much RAM you have. For 1GB I recommend doubling the values (6 and 72 respectively). For 2GB of RAM, I use 16 and 102 respectively. For higher amounts of RAM, try raising them higher, however note that you should also raise the iPreloadSizeLimit value below.


iPreloadSizeLimit=26214400 - This setting appears to determine the maximum amount (in bytes) of RAM allowed for preloading game data. The higher the value, the more chance you have of reducing stuttering. The default value equates to around 25MB (divide the setting by 1024 to get KB, then by 1024 again to get MB). For those with 1GB of system RAM, try doubling the variable to 52428800. For those with 2GB, try double again at 104857600 (100MB). You can raise these values even further to experiment, however note that raising this to a large amount doesn't force all the game data to sit in RAM, and can actually cause crashes. I suggest the maximum anyone should set this to should be around 262144000 (250MB), even for 2GB of RAM. Make sure to raise your Cell Buffer values accordingly (see above).


bPreemptivelyUnloadCells=0 - If set to 1, this setting attempts to unload cell data it thinks you won't need. This can help those with less than 1GB of RAM, however with 1GB or more of RAM, I recommend leaving it at 0 for greatly reduced stuttering.


Importantly: As you raise the values of iPreloadSizeLimit and the Cell Buffer variables further above, you should make sure bPreemptivelyUnloadCells is set to 0 to take advantage of such additional memory allocation, otherwise it will actively work against the benefits brought about by the other tweaks.
"

Wonder how all those reviews came up with "runs Oblivion at the highest settings" for the M1710 though. Must have only tried the eraly stages

~Ah!
I was thinking of doing that myself, especially since it now claims it is "Tech + Gaming Support"

How can they blame Oblivion when their reviews specifically say "Play Oblivion and F.E.A.R at the highest settings. *sigh*

I guess I'll just run around on foot whenever it becomes unbearable.