Why is my oblivion choppy sometimes?

[madman322]

I have an HIS 5850 and a core i7 920 (not overclocked), 6GB Super Talent DDR3 1866. Most of my games play quite smoothly (Fallout 3, L4D2) but i seem to be having a bit of trouble with oblivion. I ran FRAPS during my game and with all max settings, I was getting an average of around 60FPS. Fine. However, relatively often, when a new enemy enters or i move into a different city, the game halts for a second, the FPS drops to around 20 and then shoots back up to 60. No, it isn't completely game rendering, but I paid for a very expensive system and i don't think I should have this problem. I am not sure if this is a VGA, CPU, RAM, or another problem so this post may be in the wrong category, my apologies. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.

 

[megamanx00]

That happens because it's loading an area. In order to play on a variety of system (and probably to compensate for less RAM on the 360 and PS3), it is designed to only load what it needs and the load some more when it thinks it will need it. Granted it's not really too good at this, and the loading is why you get those drops. The game that comes closest to properly doing continuous loading without grinding to a halt is Gothic 3 (with all the patches).

Anyway, the only thing you can do to speed things up is tweak it at strange said, or get an SSD hard drive to shorten those small, and annoyingly constant, loading times.