SureAI

Hi
Everybody's system is different. Some run lots of app's in background. Sound cards affect Oblivion engine. Slow hard drives (make sure hd is not getting full). Check Oblivion tweak wiki if its affecting game play so badly. You can find that running ffdshow filter will slow you down etc.

At the moment (because of stupidity on my part, virus on pc I play games on has just had 3 hd's wiped out), playing Nehrim on a pc with specs of: 2gb / AMD64 X2 6000+ /GT9500.
By the looks of it getting about 25fps avg (cannot run fraps kills the game) and apart from the odd stutter when fps drops to 7 or 8 for a second or two. It is playable and quite smooth upto now.

Hi.

In my never ending search for different software. I have just come across "Game Booster Portable". Just put it on my USB stick to try out. It is a beta version, but a couple of nice points allready, is it informs you of any new drivers needed ( my sound card needed updating, took me straight to download on Realtek site). It will defrag game folder. Checks background services etc and offers to close down all unwanted services to go into game mode.
It may not help my FPS here, but at least it helped with updating my drivers.

Hmmm


I'm running Fraps, does it knock this game that much do you think ?

It never occurred to me that Fraps could be knocking perfomance.

Yeah...it like near kills me. I run it sometimes especially when I play wow and it causes major stuttering. Changing the settings on it may help some or just doing it the old fashion way and turn it off until you think something cool will happen? LOL

I hope this solves it.

its odd, Oblivion does this to me also but to a lesser extent than Nehrim.

I'm running a Q9650 (3.00 x 4), 8 gig of DDR3, an SSD hard drive and a Sapphire 5970.

The game just doesn't seem to be using the juice thats on tap.

I can run Crysis maxed out on DX10 and average 60 to 70 fps with 8 x AA and 8 x AF yet with Nehrim I've had to drop to 4 x AA and 4 x AF just to run fairly smoothly but I'm still down to 15 fps in Erothin and other towns.

Can't figure this one out.

2 Meren
It seems that all the above mentioned problems are caused by Nehrim only. There is no link between drivers/hardware and Nehrim perfomance.
Before your post I thought that low perfomance could be caused by drivers.... But now, I doubt
My specs as follows
Phenom II x 4 965 (3.8 Ghz)
M3N-HT HDMI Delux (780a)
2x GTX 480 SLI
4 X WD3200AAKS (Raid 0)
8 gb Ram (DDR2)
Corsair TX 950 W
So, I have the same 15 fps in Erothin and other towns, and my GPU ussage 9%
In other games (e.g GTA IV) I'm getting 85-95% GPU usage and great framerate. In original Oblivion I'm also getting 200+ fps.
By the way Meren what OS do you use ? I'm running the games on Windows 7 x 64. Maybe we have such a terrible perfomance in Nehrim due to 64 bit OS

TheHawk: thanks for the tips, I appreciate your time! You misunderstood me though:

What I was trying to say was that it is not our machines that cause slowdowns, but something else.
Bottlenecks causing slowdowns happen if any part required for application running (CPU/GPU/HDD/mem) is overloaded (meaning usage more than 80-90%, or continous dataflow for HDDs/mem) for a period of time.
In this case if you lower the workload for overloaded parts (like AA for GPU, closing background apps for CPU) slowdowns usually go away (if usage goes below critical line)

My remark was, that it is not the state of my computer causing slowdowns, but something else: since no part was overloaded/used more when slowdowns happened.
Since my GPU wasn't used more than 40% any time, it is all the same if I use no AA or 8x. (A 2x GTX480 gets 9% load, a 4850 gets 40%, an older card may get 60% load, but FPS in cityes remain 15.)
Since my CPU wasn't used more than 70%, it is all the same if I calculating Pi in the background. (If I run something, my CPU load is 95%, if I don't it can go down to 60%, a quadcore OCd may get 20% load and all giving 15 fps)

I don't know much about game engines, it is probable that things get overloaded without actual hardware overload, but still I showed my findings for someone more experienced than me.

Hi
Seen no difference between 64 bit and 32 bit so far ( had to reinstall OS due to viruses wiping drives out and changed to 32 bit ).
Had Nehrim on my other pc running a 9500GT and now back to this one running GTS9800 X 2, Phenom with 4 cores unlocked and twice as much memory. Still can only get 10 to 15 fps more, and yes it does slow down round cities to 15 to 20 fps at times.
Its not always cpu's/gpu's that can cause slow fps. Apart from sound cards and system drivers, there is running mods which try to render too much at different times. Running Nehrim (a mod) the ammount of files needed to load at different times must be larger than Oblivion ever needed to.
Game engines have there own peculiarities as well i.e Gothic (almost gave in playing at one time) which leaked memory non stop and was only found out after a long time. Now Nehrim has much better graphics and sound (I believe )to Oblivion, maybe its pushing the boundaries so far.

Running Win 7 64 bit but have also tried it on the kitchen rig (Intel dual core 2.66, 4 gig DDR2, Sapphire 5870, Win 7 32 bit) and get similar results.

Hawk

You just gave me an idea and I checked out the sound files, some of them are at 320 kbps and are huge, one of the town tracks is over 13 mb in size, wonder if that could account for our slowdowns in towns.

Hi Could try disabling sound in ini file. Although I dont think it would stop the files trying to load.