Optimising Oblivion

FOV
Bringing down the console and typing:

fov 90

Will set your field of view to 90 degrees. Some will find this more appealing. However it resets back to 75 after any zoomed conversations. Setting the value:

fDefaultFOV=90.0000  (default 75.0000)

Will fix this, but your menus will be mis-aligned. Fun to play with for now, but not practical. Watch the official forums for updates on getting this working.

  

ABOVE: 75 and 90 degree FOV.

There’s more you can do to improve visuals in the ini file, but these are the most important. Nothing to stop you experimenting though!

Performance
Quite a few tips add up here to produce a positive result.

Drivers
Shouldn’t need to say it, but for those who need to hear it: update your soundcard drivers and videocard drivers to the latest. For NVIDIA users, there’s an ‘Oblivion compatible’ 84.25 set available here:

http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_downloads_rel70betadriver.html

And defrag your boot and game partitions. Yes, really, it’s worth the wait.

Settings

1) Set iPreloadSizeLimit as on the previous page.

2) Grass is one the biggest FPS killers outside. You can tweak it down and get a boost to performance without any real noticeable change in gorgeousness.

iMinGrassSize=130     (default 80)
fGrassEndDistance=8000.0000   (default whatever you set in game)
fGrassStartFadeDistance=7000.0000 (default whatever you set in game)

The first setting is the key. It reduces the density of the grass. If you have a middle or low-end machine, try a value of 150 or even 200, and shorten the distances.

3) NVIDIA users: in the NVIDIA control panel with coolbits enabled go Performance & Quality Settings --> Additional Direct3D Settings and set Frames to render ahead to ‘0’ or ‘1’ from ‘3’. Another golden forum tip.

4) Conceiveably, this should help all those with SM 3.0 capable cards, though we’ve seen no measurable change:

Allow30Shaders=1  (default 0)

5) Lower memory machines may benefit from the following, suck it and see:

bPreemptivelyUnloadCells=1 (default 0)

6) Finally, the thread tips in the next section seem to help.