Oblivion is *NOT* SMP/SMT optimized on PC

S

Sabrewulf165

2[H]4U
Joined
Jun 23, 2004
Messages
2,974
Unless or until someone can show me otherwise, I hold this as fact, and I offer the following test as proof.

Test System
===============
X2 3800+ @ 2.4 ghz
2x1 GB DDR400
7900 GTX
All maximum in-game settings, self shadows off

Results
===============
1280x1024, 4xAA: 40fps, composite CPU utilization 50% max
640x480, noAA: 40fps, composite CPU utilization 50% max

1280x1024, 4xAA, CPU affinity one core only: 40fps
640x480, noAA, CPU affinity one core only: 40fps

Results @ 2.0 ghz
===============
1280x1024, 4xAA: 32fps, composite CPU utilization 50% max
640x480, noAA: 32fps, composite CPU utilization 50% max

1280x1024, 4xAA, CPU affinity one core only: 32fps
640x480, noAA, CPU affinity one core only: 32fps

As you can see, the game clearly has room for better cpu performance, and yet it clearly isn't making any use of the second core (other than OS/video driver load balancing). I will post a picture of the area I am using for testing soon.
 
Actually, no, in their interview with bit-tech they said, and I quote

Gavin Carter said:
"Oblivion will absolutely benefit from a multi-processor or multi-core PC architecture. These improvements have largely been driven by our optimizations for the Xbox 360 hardware… Portions of physics, AI, loading, audio, and rendering tasks can all be moved to different threads…"
Click to expand...
 
I would post this on some offical threads. Maybe all you need is a simple ini modification.
 
What's interesting is that if you poke around in the configuration file, you'll see there's a cvar that sets the number of physics engine instances. 1 is one thread, 2 is two threads. The default, no matter what the configuration, is 1. You may want to try and mess around with this cvar and see if it brings performance up any.

Does anyone really expect Bethesda to do anything correctly (with respect to the PC version)? I for one, simply do not.
 
phide said:
What's interesting is that if you poke around in the configuration file, you'll see there's a cvar that sets the number of physics engine instances. 1 is one thread, 2 is two threads. The default, no matter what the configuration, is 1. You may want to try and mess around with this cvar and see if it brings performance up any.

Does anyone really expect Bethesda to do anything correctly (with respect to the PC version)? I for one, simply do not.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I love their games to death, but come on. 4 years and 2 expansions later, I still get crashes to desktop in Morrowind, and horrible hitching with shadows enabled.

NoDamage said:
Do the multithreading .ini tweaks and the preloadsizelimit tweak and see if you notice a difference. Information available in the tweak guide here:

http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/article.asp?CIID=36222
Click to expand...

Yeah I'm going to try those next. Though I already tried most of the threading .ini tweaks and didn't really notice any difference in performance or smoothness. That "render frames ahead" tweak is also pointless IMO, but some people swear by it. I for one would like to just have Oblivion cram as many textures and cells into video and main memory as my computer can handle so that I'd never have to see a hitch. I mean cripes, UT2k4 uses almost as much RAM as Oblivion does, what kind of sense does that make?
 
ok i got another question since i havent played it yet.. does it truely utelize SLI setup like COD2 did wiht almost double the performance or is stupid in that aspect 2??
 
DJ_007 said:
ok i got another question since i havent played it yet.. does it truely utelize SLI setup like COD2 did wiht almost double the performance or is stupid in that aspect 2??
Click to expand...

I think I remember someone saying they checked the SLI load balance and it was almost entirely on one card, but I'm sure nVidia will fix that with subsequent driver releases. The game is still horribly CPU-bound in many situations though (outdoors with long view distance, anyplace with lots of NPCs)
 
yeah there was a way to enable SMP on Quake 4 but it made it become unstable...
 
Sabrewulf165 said:
I think I remember someone saying they checked the SLI load balance and it was almost entirely on one card, but I'm sure nVidia will fix that with subsequent driver releases. The game is still horribly CPU-bound in many situations though (outdoors with long view distance, anyplace with lots of NPCs)
Click to expand...

Also, make sure you're using the 84.25 drivers, they've supposedly got some Oblivion optimizations in there.
 
|MaguS| said:
When I enabled those tweaks the game became unstable... I had to revert back to the original ini.
Click to expand...


Same issue here, I tried these tweaks, specifically the threaded tweaks (mp ones worked fine as well as the grids) but the game froze on me right after I setup these weaks and downloaded the PC GUI mod.
 
NoDamage said:
Do the multithreading .ini tweaks and the preloadsizelimit tweak and see if you notice a difference. Information available in the tweak guide here:

http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/article.asp?CIID=36222
Click to expand...

thanks for posting that, those tweaks really helped me out ALOT

I did not enable the GUI mod, thats the kind of mod I like to let go through a revision or two before trying...

edit - it also probably helped that I moved my pagefile off my boot drive and created an ISO which is mouted from my raptor (boot drive)...much better now
 
DJ_007 said:
yeah there was a way to enable SMP on Quake 4 but it made it become unstable...
Click to expand...


Sounds like an issue with your system. Myself and a friend played the hell out of Q4 with the SMP patch without a single crash and it made some HUGE boosts to my perfomance.


Very disapointing that oblivion isn't multithreaded... Any game developers these days making single threaded games should be beaten.
 
beanman101283 said:
Didn't they say you wouldn't be able to tell much of a difference between dual and single core?
Click to expand...


Yes they did.
They've always stressed the game is gpu limited.
People expecting gains from dual core w/ this game were somewhat deluded I think.
They did hype it a little bit, but only cause the interviewers kept asking if
it takes advantage of dual core. All they said was yeah some of the optimizations
from the X360 are in the PC code too. Of course the X360 architecture relies on
getting the 3 cores working together. It's simply not a factor on the PC.
 
Sabrewulf165 said:
Unless or until someone can show me otherwise, I hold this as fact, and I offer the following test as proof.
.
Click to expand...
What do you expect? It has been in development since way before dual cores hit it big. You need to wait for games optimized for more modern hardware. This things are nothing new!
 
cyks said:
What do you expect? It has been in development since way before dual cores hit it big. You need to wait for games optimized for more modern hardware. This things are nothing new!
Click to expand...


But if they indeed SAID it would be multithreaded for the PC and it isn't, that's just lame.
 
Devnull said:
But if they indeed SAID it would be multithreaded for the PC and it isn't, that's just lame.
Click to expand...

Very true. And since they had no problems with multi-threading on the 360 i can only assume its another one of those decisions to lose something so the 360 version looks better.

Unless we're wrong and the game actually IS multi-threaded and the extra horsepower is being used for AI or whatever instead of just to increase framerate.
 
I know I was the OP, but honestly I'm sort of over it at this point. I don't think anything would've made the game run well on this generation of hardware regardless. The easiest and fastest performance tweak I've found is to open the console and type in "tg", which disables grass :p Doubles my framerate and it's a helluva lot easier to see where I'm going and what I'm fighting (and also to pick out harvest plants from regular scenery)

However I do still stick to my point, which is that there's obviously room for better CPU performance, and I wish Bethsoft had spent a little more time optimizing the game for dual cores (or you old timers with honest to god mutli-processor setups ;))
 
Look in the ini file, there are plenty of options for threading, including something like iNumThreads, defaulted to 3 I believe.
 
CodeX said:
Look in the ini file, there are plenty of options for threading, including something like iNumThreads, defaulted to 3 I believe.
Click to expand...

Some people get crashes with those tweaks, others claim less lag during battles. Personally I can't tell much difference even with all of them enabled, but either way my main gripe is that general rendering wasn't multi-threaded at all, when clearly it could have benefitted.
 
Skirrow said:
Very true. And since they had no problems with multi-threading on the 360 i can only assume its another one of those decisions to lose something so the 360 version looks better.

Unless we're wrong and the game actually IS multi-threaded and the extra horsepower is being used for AI or whatever instead of just to increase framerate.
Click to expand...


Doing anything other than rendering in a seperate thread DOES increase framerate... I haven't seen any evidence of this game using more than 50% cpu on a dual-core system so I assume it doesn't do that at all. It's difficult to split rendering into multiple threads, but breaking off things like AI, sound, networking(for mp games), input etc is easy.


I tried the ini tweaks and it didn't seem to work. I'm betting that they disabled it in the engine. I wouldn't be suprised if they intentionally crippled the PC version, seems that way with the lack of AF and the no AA+HDR issue. Microshaft strikes again.
 
phide said:
I have serious doubts that threading fares better on the 360.
Click to expand...


When a game is made for both a console and the PC, the PC version is often a simple afterthought with little resources devoted to it. Only good exception that comes to mind is Riddick, awesome game and they totally improved it for the PC.
 
Devnull said:
When a game is made for both a console and the PC, the PC version is often a simple afterthought with little resources devoted to it. Only good exception that comes to mind is Riddick, awesome game and they totally improved it for the PC.
Click to expand...

There is only one problem with that, the game was written primarily for PC. This was in development since 2002, the platforms they listed back then were PC and future generation consoles. They had no idea about the xbox 360 back then.
 
CodeX said:
There is only one problem with that, the game was written primarily for PC. This was in development since 2002, the platforms they listed back then were PC and future generation consoles. They had no idea about the xbox 360 back then.
Click to expand...


Halo was written primarily for the PC with no idea about the xbox and was getting close to completion when microsoft bought them out. We all saw how that worked out for the PC :p
 
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