Oblivion STILL owns video cards.

I recently bought a single vanilla EVGA GTX 480 and threw it in my gaming rig with a Core i7 920 overclocked to 3.4GHz and 6GB G.Skill. And even more recently added 2 128GB C300 SSDs in RAID-0, then reinstalled Win 7, optimized the OS, it's FAST, blah blah blah.

Been playing Oblivion for a while since then and it's been great, of course. Maxed all of the settings, even tweaked a few Oblivion.ini settings for some more graphical goodness. In the last couple weeks I've been using the EVGA Precision tool, which helps me know how much of the video card is being used. It also measures temps, fan speed, and allows you to control fan speed and clock speeds but I haven't messed with those. To my surprise, Oblivion will use as much as 86% of my GPU in some situations. I have the driver sitting at 4x AA and 16x AF so that will bring utilization up naturally.

In the past few days I've been using the latest NVidia drivers which allow Ambient Occlusion and I read that it works well with Oblivion. I figured the GTX 480 would have enough headroom to use the Quality setting, especially for a 4 year old game, so I pumped it up to Quality. Again, to my surprise, the GPU was hitting 99% a lot more often, mostly in wooded areas. Choppiness ensued. I bumped it down to Performance and there were more shadow anomolies than having it shut off completely, but performance was slightly better. I ultimately shut it off because of the anomolies (most notibly was a definied square shadow area that looked a lot better without AO).

Moral of the story: Oblivion is still a force to be reckoned with, and even moreso with Ambient Occlusion turned on. However, you can make the game look AMAZING even without making any changes to the skins. If you enable precision shadows, force SM3.0 (which apparently does nothing for graphics quality in Oblivion), enable Ambient Occlusion, and forcing full LOD (level of detail) on trees, things do look a lot better, but the game slows down considerably. I would say that 95% of the slowdown occured with AO enabled. Enabling precision shadows, tree LOD, and SM3 didn't seem to hit performance much at all.

Just my 2c, I will continue to tweak and test as time goes on. I still love this game

You sound like you have a Celeron cpu and a FX 5200 graphic card?

My old rig beats the hell out of Oblivion. Don't get me wrong, even now i play the game and enjoy. I also use Oblivion HD texture patch (2 GB) and many other patches that make Oblivion graphic better.

Your GTX480's usage should be at 99% all the time whilst playing any game so long as there's no FPS cap caused by the game itself or V-sync. This way your GTX480 will produce as many FPS as it can.

It means ambient occlusion.Other names for it are HBAO,SSAO.google it for the meaning.In any game when you enable it it creates soft shadows in grass and at other areas by the gpu by calculating it.There is a 5-15fps loss on enabling.Actually unless you took a screenshot you wouldn't know the difference bewteen on and off so I always turn it off in all games

Just to help you if you want some examples of AO here are some screenshots form battle field bad company 2
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=315680

@celpas Thanks link was useful. How to enable AO for Oblivion? Maybe by editing ini (configuration text)?

@omgitzfatal Agree, it's more professional to say % and to back it up with links or photos. We will learn

Forcing settings the game engine wasn't built with usually causes it to take up a lot more resources than it otherwise would.

Hell, in Minecraft I put on a 256 texture pack (16 being default) and turned on SSAA, and my FPS is around 80. In MINECRAFT. lol. Although it only uses one 5850 since there's no CF support for it.

But anyway, what's your favorite car to drive around the test track, Stig?

The percentage for GPU usage while gaming is not an indication of how much it is stressing your video card. Frames per second at maximum settings is an indication of how demanding a game is to your GPU.

Just to clarify, I'm running at 1920x1080, 16xAF 4xAA, and normally have AO off. I run with VSync on. I should really shut it off to see what kind of FPS it will do, but if turning AO on brings it down to 30fps in certain circumstances, then it can't sustain 60fps even with VSync off. AO will bring a card to its knees for any game from what I've read. But I should see what what it does with AO off and VSync off.

I also have a tweaked .INI file but it's not extensively tweaked, just a few items.

Sounds like vsync to me, especially if you're capped at 60fps, and I think Oblivion is supposed to work with SLI. I'd check vsync, but having it enabled would reduce tearing and possibly increase studdering because if you reach an area that your card can't maintain 60fps, it'll drop to 30fps immediately to stay within a multiple of 60. It's 60, 30, then 15. It is forced to skip rendering a frame so that it doesn't try to display the frame while the screen is refreshing.

That's not always true. If Oblivion uses buffering, it will alternate buffers and allow for FPS between 30 and 60. OpenGL often didn't do this, which I'm not sure if Oblivion uses OpenGL or DirectX, but if it is OpenGL, you can enable triple buffering in your graphics card control panel.

I generally recommend Vsync, but if you do have difficulties with things as you said, then you might want to turn it off. I personally use a 120hz monitor now, which allows for much higher FPS and Vsync almost never caps me at 60 FPS, it goes all over the place, as long as triple buffering is available.

Keep in mind, he's talking about Oblivion with many mods to enhance visuals and probably playability.

I finally found what was killing my framerate :

Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration -> Multiple Display Performance Mode (suggested global setting)

I now set it to "Single Display Performance Mode" and it fix everything. I even now use AO and all other features with steady 60fps.