Oblivion performance unplayable in PD8/Win8

J

Junap

Bit poster
I own a Mid 2011 Macbook Air (1.7GHz Core i5, 4Gb RAM, 256Gb SSD, Intel HD Graphics 3000 384 MB, running OS X 10.8.2). It's a very fast machine that gets a lot of use daily.

I just got Parallels Desktop for Mac 8 set up with a Windows 8 install and downloaded Oblivion GOTY edition from Steam. Parallels lists Oblivion as a supported title here: http://www.parallels.com/uk/products/desktop/gamers/titles/

It's unplayably slow, even on the lowest possible settings I'm getting barely 5 FPS.

The system reqs listed on Steam are:

OS: Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows XP 64-Bit
Processor: 2 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent
Memory: 512 MB
Graphics: 128 MB Direct3D compatible video card and DirectX 9.0 compatible driver
DirectX®: DirectX 9.0c
Hard Drive: 4.6 GB
Sound: DirectX 8.1 compatible

...which my Air easily beats. In the VM I have 1Gb RAM assigned, and 256Mb video memory.

I know the onboard graphics aren't exactly awesome, but I was at least expecting a playable frame rate at medium-low settings.

Am I missing something?
 
Exactly as you suspected, integrated graphics aren't exactly awesome, ULV configuration of already dated HD3000 in particular. To be fair, most games don't even mention Intel graphics as supported. In case of Oblivion, ATI X800/NVIDIA 6800 or higher is recommended. And yes, virtualization adds some overhead making it even worse.
 
Suggestions

I am new to the Mac environment, and in fact am still in the 14-day eval period on my new Macbook pro. But I've been playing and modding Oblivion in a VMware environment on a Linux host for about 2 years, so I can offer some suggestions.

First, I note that you have a dual-core processor. One thing you can do that will make a much larger difference than you might suspect is to turn off background music in Oblivion. The background MP3 playback will eat a substantial portion of one entire processor core.

Make a backup of your oblivion.ini file (which is in Documents\My Games\Oblivion\ under your user directory), then edit it to add or change the following line:

bAllowMusic=0

This is in the audio section. That's the only INI file change I recommend immediately; all the following recommendatoins are done in the in-game video settings.

Go into your game options in Oblivion and change the Texture Quality setting from High to Medium. With only 256M of VRAM, this should help a bit, and the visual difference is not as much as you might think.

Third, you can tweak some options in the Oblivion video options (from within the game, not the INI file). There are several parameters related to distant object rendering. Set the grass distance down to 50% or less -- or even 0% if you want, since grass can be annoying and is a CPU eater to render. Set the tree distance to about 60% or so. There are also settings for distant actors, distant objects, and distant items. Actors are people and creatures. Items are carryable clutter such as weapons, shovels, books, and food. Objects are the static entities in the world such as buildings, bridges, furniture, and boulders. Basically, if it's not alive and you can't move it, it's probably an object. I recommend setting "items" down to around 40% or maybe even less -- you don't really need to see an apple or a pickaxe from halfway across Cyrodiil to enjoy playing! Set actors and objects to about the same value, and tweak it as needed to balance appearance and frame rate.

Finally, in the in-game video settings, turn off self-shadows, set indoor and outdoor shadow distances to very low (or zero) values, and set minimal decal quality. All of these are "extras" that don't really affect gameplay. I personally find the pop-in and pop-out of shadows to be very distracting if it's set to a short distance, so in general if I'm on a system where I can't support distant shadows, I just turn them off entirely and save some CPU.

Hope this helps!
 
Performance

Thanks for all your advice, I will try to follow your advice on settings and music for my game.

The game that i try to play is fallout vegas edition.

Thanks again!
 
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