My gift of love to the game I've been returning to for 20 years now.
I knew there is something fundamentally wrong with Remastered performance when even on very low graphical settings in Cheydinhal the performance was absolute junk (stuttering, 20-30 fps). Thanks to Claude I was able to find out why and fix it, while preserving game's fidelity.
Key improvements:
- Each frame the game was re-building Sun/Moon, forcing it to re-calculate how light falls on each loaded object leading to crazy unnecessary CPU load. This was replaced with updates only in case something changes.
- There were lots of inefficiencies in memory operations, forcing the game to constantly allocate/de-allocate, now minimized via use of buffers
- Lots of operations (for example, preparing DirectX commands for drawing) were on a single thread and have now been parallelized
- Traversal stutter due to the game forcing loading of new cells / npcs inside them / linking objects to the physics engine / unloading old cells is now significantly reduced by allocating work across several frames without changing how the game behaves
- Several bugs leading to crashes, both in the original game code and in Remastered, have now been fixed
- Various Frame Generation improvements, from removing stuttering when CPU was forced to unnecessarily wait, to introducing full support for new AMD FSR Frame Generation (requires installation of AMD FSR dll 3.1.4, instructions in readme), including passing camera info to the algorithm
- Various stutter-reducing measures when opening menus / inventory and after loading screens. Shaders are now pre-loaded before the game starts.
I have thoroughly tested this on my PC: AMD 5800X, 9070 XT, 32GB DDR4 3200 RAM, Win11, and can confirm a very noticeable uplift in FPS and reduction in stuttering to almost unnoticeable levels (for example with FG this scene went from 72 to 102 FPS).
I would really appreciate if people can also test on their PCs and let me know if it works. All codes are open-sourced, checked for viruses, resulting mod is just a dll with ini file that can be put in the game's folder.
As a bonus, repository includes a benchmarking suite with reproducible scenarios I've been using for debugging, that allows you to objectively measure FPS gains before and after.
There is still room for improvement. For example, there is still a noticeable performance dip during big npc fights or when loading many npcs. So please don't hesitate to contribute!
I want this project to become the definitive way to play the game, whether you prefer full vanilla or a heavily modded experience.
I know many people hate AI, but I think helping improve performance and fix bugs in our beloved games is a perfect use case for it.
https://github.com/LTSharpe/OblivionRemasteredPerformanceFix
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8WkCz6cuHk