Howdy folks, I've been tweaking settings again looking for performance changes and I noticed a curious correlation. If you've ever turned on the debug text with the tdt command you've seen the line that contains the BSTask count. I've searched the Oblivion communities to find out what exactly this line indicates and no one seems to know. There are several mentions of it on TESNexus but no real answers. It seems universally agreed that when this count gets high, stuttering occurs. So, first off does anyone know what this thing is?
Most of the time the count remains on a fixed, low number. When a new cell is loaded though (I think) the count skyrockets. I'd imagine it has something to do with loading meshes or textures or scripts, something that you would need to render and run a new cell as the player enters it. Improtantly, I noticed that when a cell loads the count can get above 500 (and the framerate dips substantially) but quickly returns to a lower value. Every time a new cell is loaded though the count settles at 10-20 higher than what it was before. When you load up the game it should start at 0 and then works its way up into the hundreds.
For me, after a few hours of constant play the BSTask count will climb to and stay at the 200-300 range thanks to these little fragments of 10-20 that are picked up in every cell (or at least every new city). When I then go into a city the framerate drops to an unplayable level of 1-2 where it was 15-20 when I first started the game. Eventually, when the BSTask count gets above 500 or so the game will crash. Using the pcb command does not reset this count. Neither does saving and loading a game. The only thing that will reset it is to completely exit and restart Oblivion. Has anyone investigated this curiosity or have an idea about why it happens, why it leads to low framerates and why it seems to cause ctds?
This isn't exactly a crippling problem because the easy solution is just to exit the game and restart it every 2 hours or so, but I'm still curious if anyone has this same problem or has any thought about it.
this is an ongoing issue.
this is an ongoing issue. search "BSTASK Count" in google. Morrolivion doesn't directly cause the problem, but it is affected by it. I've found that if you toggle collision off the frame rate jumps up a bunch ...
Otherwise, no one seems to know what causes this.