Performance/Hitching/Stuttering Solutions?

So i decided it was high time I try to play through Morrowind...then I remembered the combat, anti-gamepad interface, and general meh. So I then decided it was high time I played through Morroblivion...oh my those constant drops to 20 fps in cities, consistent hitching/stuttering in the wilds and jarring pop-in is really something.

I have OSR installed which takes care of the 60hz stutter and helps improve performance slightly at the cost of stability. I had Oblivion Reloaded maxed out until I realized some of the effects are a little heavier on performance than advertised. I removed all the effects aside from god rays and color correction, general fps improved but cities still plummet to 20's.

I don't really understand what is going on here, in Morrowind I can get fairly good performance in cities, even with MGSO enabled with modest settings. Is it the pretty high res textures that come stock with Morroblivion? Are we just doomed to have no more than 1-2 npcs on screen at a time in the Oblivion Engine?

Perhaps there is no solution to this and I'm being unrealistic in shooting for a smooth 60 fps on a I5 4670k 4.2/Gtx 1070/16gb ram build. If people just put up with 20 fps in cities that's fine, I just want to know I'm not going crazy. If I can't enjoy the experience at a reasonably constant 60 fps, I can always wait for Skywind.

mikjames wrote:

mikjames
So i decided it was high time I try to play through Morrowind...then I remembered the combat, anti-gamepad interface, and general meh. So I then decided it was high time I played through Morroblivion...oh my those constant drops to 20 fps in cities, consistent hitching/stuttering in the wilds and jarring pop-in is really something.

I have OSR installed which takes care of the 60hz stutter and helps improve performance slightly at the cost of stability. I had Oblivion Reloaded maxed out until I realized some of the effects are a little heavier on performance than advertised. I removed all the effects aside from god rays and color correction, general fps improved but cities still plummet to 20's.

I don't really understand what is going on here, in Morrowind I can get fairly good performance in cities, even with MGSO enabled with modest settings. Is it the pretty high res textures that come stock with Morroblivion? Are we just doomed to have no more than 1-2 npcs on screen at a time in the Oblivion Engine?

Perhaps there is no solution to this and I'm being unrealistic in shooting for a smooth 60 fps on a I5 4670k 4.2/Gtx 1070/16gb ram build. If people just put up with 20 fps in cities that's fine, I just want to know I'm not going crazy. If I can't enjoy the experience at a reasonably constant 60 fps, I can always wait for Skywind.

The main problem is that the Oblivion/TES4 engine was not optimized for a full openworld on the level of Morrowind. The Morroblivion worldspace is not partitioned like the Oblivion worldspace... if you turn on distantlands and modify the settings to try produce the same visual results as MGEXE, the TES4 engine will choke and die unless you optimize the dataset. There is nothing on the level of MGE-XE's optimized distantlands renderer for the TES4 engine.

Your easiest solution for more optimized distant lands is to turn on OblivionReloaded's FPS manager and set the goal FPS setting to your desired framerate.

Make sure you have an SSD to help mitigate the unoptimized loading of entire cells and related assets. Overclock and optimize your CPU for the fastest single core performance it can muster. Overclock and optimize your GPU and active shaders to produce the lowest latency in a multi-pass/multi-stage rendering pipeline. Further discussion is beyond the scope of a single forum topic, but you can search the forums and also the discord HelpDesk channel for more tips and insight into the issues with optimizing Morroblivion for the TES4 engine.

I have an overclocked AMD Phenom II X4 945 @ 3.2 ghz from about 10 years ago. It gets a decent 20 fps in the wilderness with Distant Lands/HDR/AO/DoF turned on and will drop down to about 12 fps in the cities. About one month ago, I upgraded to an i5 2500 @ 3.3 Ghz which has 2x the single core performance as my overclocked Phenom II X4. I am now getting an average 24 fps in the cities. Which is to say, if you are dedicated and determined enough to do proper optimization, you can probably achieve an ideal Morroblivion framerate somewhere along a linear performance curve which is fitted to the above two single-core CPU to framerate datapoints.

EDIT:
I did the math for your CPU. Your CPU's single thread performance is not very impressive. Perhaps you can get to 28fps in the cities:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Phenom-II-X4-945-vs-Intel-i5-2500-vs-Intel-i5-4670K/7vs803vs1921

Math:
(2191 / 1877) * 24 fps = 28 fps

So based on your preferences and desires for consistent 60fps gaming, you will probably be better off uninstalling Morroblivion and waiting for Skywind to maximize your quality of life. Hope this helps with your decision making.

Out of curiosity, I checked

Out of curiosity, I checked cpubenchmark.net and found their charts' current fastest single-threaded CPU is the i7-8086k @ 4Ghz with a rating of 2864. That would give it a predicted Morroblivion fps of about 36fps in the cities. If anyone has this CPU and can verify the minimum average FPS in cities, please let us know. Thanks.

Now that the forum is

Now that the forum is functioning properly again I can finally reply :) So I see what you're saying PR. By partitioning are you referring to closed cities, or something more? If it's something fixable I'd have thought it would be implemented during Morroblivion's development, I can't imagine most people are happy gaming at 20 fps... Regarding distant land, it doesn't really matter to me. Sure it would be ideal to have distant land enabled, but it would also be ideal for it to function without jarring pop-in, hitching, and generally tanking performance, so I instead choose to roleplay that Morrowind is foggy/dusty place, the fog helps to mask objects suddenly appearing in the distance. Regarding single core performance, is Oblivion limited to a single core? That's pathetic for a game released in 2006 when dual and even quad cores were common, but it is Bethesda, and dynamic object shadows we're also fairly common in 2008 (Fallout 3) so... In any case, there is no reason for anyone to buy a top of the line Core i7 to run this game, as there is going to be minimal or no difference between a Core i7 8086k, and a Core i3 8350k, particularly considering anyone who buys a K series is going to be trying to get as close to 5ghz as they can, which brings me back to my setup... The 4670k is maybe 15% slower than a 8350k at the same clock speed. Pitiful I know, but AMD isn't exactly giving Intel any reason to innovate. The thing is, I'm already pushing the 4670k to the maximum my board will support. High end boards could manage 4.6 ghz on all cores, with maybe 4.8ghz on a single core via turbo boost, my board is limited due to the vrms. I'm pushing 4.2ghz on all 4 cores, but when only a single core is active I have it set to boost to 4.6, and 4.5 when 2 cores are active. Now it's possible that Oblivion/Windows is using all 4 cores but isn't utilizing them above 25%, I've seen that happen before and it could mitigate turbo boost, I'll look into disabling cores entirely and see if that makes any difference. Upgrading to a newer platform could allow me to have a single core at 5ghz or even above, or a dual core at 4.8, but that would require an entirely new ddr4 platform, and memory is retardedly expensive right now for whatever reason. It's not worth is right now for a 20% performance increase. Hmm, I swear there are spaces in my text formatting, is there something I'm missing here or is this just another forum issue? I'd rather avoid creating walls of text with no formatting.