In order to honor the release of one of the most anticipated games of 2006, MegaGames has put together a list of the most useful tweaks and mods that will help gamers make the most of their encounter with Oblivion.
Enjoying Oblivion in all its splendor can only be viewed as a tribute to the talented people that have spent countless hours working in order to deliver a top notch game for fans and new players alike and these tweaks should put you well on your way to doing just that.
The first problem when compiling such a list of tweaks is to manage to get our heads out of the game for long enough to discover them, the second being accepting that there are ways to improve the already amazing experience. But we have sacrificed ourselves so that those that follow get a better quality Oblivion.
Oblivion players have been quick to rush to the forums and claim that this or that change has helped them get the most out of the game but you have to remember that many tweaks are hardware dependent so make sure you pick and mix from the ones provided below while always checking to see if they are actually providing an improvement. The best way to check improved performance is common sense although FPS can also help. To view FPS in-game bring down the console and type: setdebugtext 12 tdt
The Tweaks
1. nVidia owners should go to their card's control panel with coolbits enabled and then navigate to Performance & Quality Settings -> Additional Direct3D Settings. Once there make sure that the Frames to render ahead setting is set to 0 or 1 from 3.
2. Make sure that you set your iPreloadSizeLimit=104857600 (default 2621440)
3. Grass. According to all players, the main performance killer in the game, specifically in the outdoor areas is grass. Depending on the performance capcity of your machines you should try and control the density of grass. You can chaneg those settings by setting: iMinGrassSize=150 (default 80)
Those of you with lower end machines can even set it to 180 or 200 and see which setting works best for you. Another two grass settings which could prove useful are: fGrassEndDistance=8000.0000 fGrassStartFadeDistance=7000.0000
4. If you wish to enable shader model 3.0 use: Allow30Shaders=1
5. Atomicmpc also recommends the following thread tweaks for reducing waiting times although the writers are not quite certain yet about their significance.
Rememeber these tweaks will not buy you a new system, they are mainly to be used, wisely, in order to improve performance. Try messing around with each setting until you find the one that suits your hardware best. We will keep updating these tweaks as we find more.
