Optimising Oblivion

No Soup for you!
The low-resolution distant landmass textures have been called ‘soup’ on the official forums. Fix it like so:

uGridsToLoad = 9   (default 5)
uExterior Cell Buffer=100  (default 36)

Stuff to note: Grids must be an odd number. It can be higher, 11+ for e.g., but this starts to cause odd effects like water disappearing and hovering mountains. Fun. The Cell Buffer will raise to match, as grids influences the minimum number of cells loaded. Loading times increase, but it's well worth it.

There are a few side effects to the grids tweak: firstly, water reflections sometimes go astray where landmass meets water, but it’s not too common and easily ignored. Secondly, and more importantly, more memory is needed for the cells and (in our testing) caused weird things like missing textures.

Fortunately this is easily fixed with the following tweak, which also happens to be one of the key performance boosters:

iPreloadSizeLimit=104857600 (default 26214400)

The value is in bytes. If you have a 1G or less machine and this causes troubles, set it to 52428800. Note: This tweak has been updated, if you previously applied this tweak check your values with the above.

  

ABOVE: First with pea soup, then without. Not only does it look better, but with the performance tweaks it does so without losing FPS.

Pretty water
The water is pretty swank in Oblivion, but you can add a bit more eye candy for a small performance hit with the following:

bUseWaterReflectionsMisc=1  (default 0)
bUseWaterReflectionsStatics=1 (default 0)
bUseWaterReflectionsTrees=1  (default 0)
bUseWaterReflectionsActors=1  (default 0)
uSurfaceFPS=15     (default 12)

Turn off ‘Actors’ and ‘Misc’ if you want a balance between the main environment (landmass, buildings) being reflected and performance.

Pretty trees
The impact of this is subtle both in looks and performance. Suit to taste.

bForceFullLOD=1  (default 0)

Introduction movies
Bored of pressing Esc?

SIntroSequence=

(default SIntroSequence=bethesda softworks HD720p.bik,2k games.bik,game studios.bik,Oblivion Legal.bik)

We still love you Bethesda!