Why has Oblivion started to lag after a year of working fine?

[fishyfisherman]

Oblivion had no trouble working for more than a year, maybe even over two. Only when the textures and resolution both were set to their highest levels did the framerate slow enough to even be perceivable.

Now if even 2 NPCs appear onscreen, if I look at a fire, see an Npc cast a spell, or go into nearly any outdoor area, even 10 fps is too much to ask for. On occasion it might drop to four. And that's on the lowest resolution and rendering settings available!

I had stopped playing for maybe two weeks, and during that time I had re-loaded Morrowind on my computer (I Did not allow it to install its version of DirectX, not sure if that's important). I may have also loaded a mod on Oblivion before playing it again, I'm not sure. It wasn't a risky mod though, fairly old, frequently used, and no bugs reported.

 

[beznet]

My friend had fairly similar problems with Crysis.

Though, he was using an Asus gaming laptop. Are you playing your games off of a laptop?

If not them check your GPU/CPU temps under load. Tell us your computer specs and post the temperatures here if you arnt sure if it's overheating or not

 

[Herr_Koos]

What mod, specifically? Mods do have a tendency to impact game performance, so it may be significant.

 

[FunSurfer]

What are your PC specs?
Are you using now the same graphic drivers that you used when Oblivion ran smoothly?

 

[fishyfisherman]

My friend had fairly similar problems with Crysis.

Though, he was using an Asus gaming laptop. Are you playing your games off of a laptop?

If not them check your GPU/CPU temps under load. Tell us your computer specs and post the temperatures here if you arnt sure if it's overheating or not

No, it's a desktop. I don't actually know what the important specs are or what most of them really mean, since I'm not a computer person. (This thing was my father's until 3 months ago, and he's a programmer, so naturally I don't know squat). So I'll just post anything that sounds impressive. X)

Dell XPS-410, Windows Vista, NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT (I assume thats the graphics card) with 256MB dedicated memory, Intel Core 2 Quad CPU @2.40 GHz.
Aa-a-nd, I'm not sure where to find any other specs.

I DID change one thing since the last time I played it, I now remember. The monitor I have now is The AOC 2236. It's an older model I think, maybe 1-2 years since its production. But I doubt it could be so inferior as to cause this.

If I missed something, tell me. And where to find it, of course.

 

[fishyfisherman]

What mod, specifically? Mods do have a tendency to impact game performance, so it may be significant.

Roberts body mod V4. The original always looked awkward. From what I could tell, It was one of the more popular downloads, and had no recurring bugs or issues.

I doubt that could be it, though. When this happened, I uninstalled and re-installed the game. The problem persisted, so I uninstalled it again, only this time I went back afterwards, and manually removed every remaining trace of the game data I could find, trying to wipe the slate clean. Reloaded a third time, and still no improvement.

Of course, I'm no programmer. So if a file didn't have the game name in the title or reside in one of the main Oblivion data folders, I'm pretty sure I missed it.

 

[beznet]

I actually had a 8600GT and tried playing Oblivion on it. From what I remember I could run it at medium settings, at best, on a 1400x900 monitor and would still get fps drops either outside or in a large portion of the city.

*Note* My 8600GT did have it's capacitors blow up after about 3 years of use.

You seem to be having slightly different problems also including the ones I just mentioned. It could also be something as simple as another program running in the background taking up a lot of your CPU for whatever reason. So close any programs you normally run then try playing the game.

If that dosent work, it could be the old overheating issue. Normally a computer shuts down after a certain degree has been reached, but sometimes a card gets old and it starts to not perform the way it used to on old settings/temperatures.

Go download an application called Speed Fan, then run Oblivion in a window so you can monitor the temperature of your graphics card. Play the game for about 10 minutes in a really graphically intensive area then report the highest temperature you see that is being reached here.

 

[Herr_Koos]

Did you change the resolution when you changed the monitor?

 

[isamuelson]

Reinstall your video drivers for your card. Maybe something got corrupted.

 

[fishyfisherman]

Did you change the resolution when you changed the monitor?

The monitor is set to display a higher resolution than the last one. I think. It's been a little while. But does that matter, since the game has its own resolution settings?

Or do you actually mean the in-game resolution? I tried to run it on the lowest settings available, with little improvement.

 

[fishyfisherman]

I hadn't thought that this might be related earlier- recently Norton has been alerting me that the graphics card, or the monitor or something else related to video, was drawing heavily on the CPU's memory. I didn't save that report page, so I have no idea what process or program it was for certain.

I'd gotten that report twice since updating to Norton 2011 about 1 month ago, and haven't played the game since before then. Both times it was on the internet, like Youtube or something.

Also, what it's referring to may not even be a new problem. Until the update I'd had Norton 2007 or earlier, and it didn't report on such things. This overuse of memory for whatever reason may have been there from the beginning.

 

[vladtheone]

It could be that your video-card burnt out, thats what happened to my friend, his video-game started going slower and slower, and he called a techinitian to check it and it was the fan that was causing the problem, it was not doing enough to cool the gpu sufficiently and did not let it work properly, and making the gpu rely heavily on the cpu for its power, so the 1st thing you could do is to check if you gpu is not clogged up with dust, and if that does not fix it all you can do it get a new one.

 

[victordilorenzo]

Try to reinstall the video card drivers. They can sometimes crap on themselves. You can DL the driver on Nvidia's website (im sure even for that old of a card).

and close norton, load oblivion and see if that helps, norton could be raping your cpu and mem.

 

[fishyfisherman]

Best answer selected by fishyfisherman.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey