Oblivion Kinda Low FPS

[caxino18]

I recently just finished modding the crap out of Oblivion, and by recently I mean I just finished. Well, to my complete surprise, I wasn't consistently hitting 60FPS! This is a surprise because I have a GTX 780Ti and I7 4770k. I looked further into and realized that my GPU load was always under 50%. By the way, when I say kinda low, I mean in the ball park of 25-50FPS. My question being, is Oblivion just poorly optimized or am I doing something wrong?

 

[justcallmetom13]

Mods usually require more VRAM than normal so modding as much as you did might strain even a 780 Ti with 3GB of VRAM.

 

[caxino18]

Mods usually require more VRAM than normal so modding as much as you did might strain even a 780 Ti with 3GB of VRAM.

I should also mention that for some weird reason, the FPS drops dramatically when I'm watching two NPCs converse

 

[justcallmetom13]

Mods usually require more VRAM than normal so modding as much as you did might strain even a 780 Ti with 3GB of VRAM.

I should also mention that for some weird reason, the FPS drops dramatically when I'm watching two NPCs converse

Yeah, it might be because the graphics card doesn't have enough VRAM. How much GB of VRAM does your 780 have? It might also be that you just plain installed too many mods and the 780 is having a hard time rendering it.

 

[Mouldread]

To me it just sounds like poorly optimized/not well written mods or possible interfering between some of the mods. Some of the authors haven't really had the chance to test their mods on a variety of machines. It might work well on theirs but not on yours etc.

 

[Rationale]

Oblivion only uses 1 CPU core. Yep, one. Only one.
Although your i7 4770k is one of the strongest CPUs, mods can even bring it down while using a single core.
NPCs' radiant AI in Oblivion also takes a lot of CPU cycles, so it's common for fps to drop the lowest while there are NPCs on screen. They "solved" this in Skyrim by making NPCs do less and talk less.
If you installed a lot of scripted mods and NPC mods (IE, cats and rats, 28 days and a bit) that will also tax your CPU heavily since it's on a single core.

Find CPU monitoring software to test this. I'm almost certain you'll find that one of your cores is hovering between 90-100% constantly with the others at low load. If one of your cores is consistently higher than 90% load, then you've found the culprit, and you'll need to identify which mods or tasks are taxing your CPU so heavily.

Your VRAM is not the problem though; Oblivion was meant to run on 256MB and 512MB cards; it's virtually impossible even using every texture mod and lighting overhaul to push it over 1GB. Back when I had a 768MB GTX 460, I still ran a complete HD texture overhaul of Oblivion without running out of VRAM.
Remember, this is a game from 2006. Almost a decade ago. 3GB of VRAM is literally impossible to expend in Oblivion, even considering mods.