Optimising Oblivion v2.0

Part 1: Looks and feel

Oblivion is gorgeous, but not quite gorgeous enough. For better or for worse, its visuals seem to be tailored to the XBOX 360. Pah to the console, this is a PC game. Think of Patrick Stewart, and make it so!

1) Level of detail
Low resolution distant texturing looks like 'soup'. To fix download and install these mods (extract them to your Oblivion\data directory):

Landscape LOD texture replacement   (download | mirror)
LOD normal map replacement   (see thread | download)
Jarrod's landscape texture replacements  (see thread | download | patch)

The first is a collection of higher resolution 2048x2048 textures over the default Bethesda 1024x1024 low-resolution ones for distant lanscapes. The second replaces the blocky normal map shadows on distant textures with smoother ones. The third provides common landscape textures (near and far) with higher quality, higher resolution replacements. These all will use more texture memory on your card, but 256M cards will handle this fine. If you've got a 512M card, you can go to insaneo levels and use 4096x4096 distant texture replacements:

4096lodtextures   (see thread | mirror1 | mirror2)

If you have a medium to high-end system, apply the old 'fix' for removing soup as well as the above texture replacements and get the best of both worlds. Note the values don't need to be as high as before, which results in better visuals and better performance:

uGridsToLoad=7   (default 5)
iPreloadSizeLimit=104857600   (default 26214400)
bUseWaterDepth=0   (default 1)
uNumDepthGrids=6   (default 3)

Note: Upping iPreloadSizeLimit is required to prevent crashing with the extra grids in memory. The last two lines all but fix water reflection corruption. Note load times *will* increase, but it's well worth it.
Note: A value called uExteriorCellBuffer will adjust automatically to a minimum 64. This setting and iPreloadSizeLimit also affect performance, see Part 2.
Note: If you use the 4096x4096 texutres, or have a 2G machine, try a value of 209715200 or more for iPreloadSizeLimit.

2) Better water
Make water sexier by reflecting more of the environment, while making it easier to see in while swimming. Download and install the following mod:

Better imperfect water   (download)

Remember to start the Oblivion launcher, select Data Files, and tick to load the mod. Note: In ver 1.0 of this guide we recommended the Better water mod (download), choose whichever takes your fancy. Next make the following changes to your .ini file:

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

Keep 'Misc' and 'Actors' at 0 if you want to just enable landmass reflections without impacting performance too much,

3) Better interface
Why does the interface looks like it's been designed for 4 year olds? Make it PC-centric by installing BTmod:

BTmod   (download)

Read the README for installation instructions.

4) More blood
Blood disappears way too quickly. Don’t they know blood stains? Make the following changes to your .ini file:

fDecalLifetime=1200.0000   (default 10)
iMaxDecalsPerFrame=500   (default 10)

Sets blood decal lifetime from 10 seconds to 20 minutes, and sets the limit of decals in game from 10 to 50.

5) Better shadows
You can tailor how sharp the canopy shadows are with:

ICanopyShadowScale=512

A value of 256 will show more leaf detail, while 1024 will smooth them out. If you want a little extra detail, set it to 256. Additionally, if you have a mid to high-end machine you can set the range at which shadows on creatures and NPCs occur to be further out, so they don't suddenly appear at close range:

fShadowLOD2=2500.0000   (default 400)
fShadowLOD1=2000.0000   (default 200)
fLightLOD2=2500.0000   (default 1500)
fLightLOD1=2000.0000   (default 1000)

ShadowLOD extends how far away shadows are cast, but needs LightLOD to extend at least far in order to operate. Natrually, the following determine how many shadows are drawn internally and externally respectively, set to taste:

IActorShadowCountInt=5
iActorShadowCountExt=2