In our review of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, after largely praising the visuals and gameplay changes made by Virtuos, reviewer Francesco De Meo also noted that the performance was highly problematic:
The game runs pretty well in closed-off environments, but the performance leaves a lot to be desired in the open world. In two different benchmarking sessions, held in the sewers during The Path of Dawn quest to meet with the Sponsor to obtain the Mythic Dawn Commentaries 4 book, at 4K resolution, NVIDIA DLSS in Quality Mode, Frame Generation Hardware Lumen and every setting at high, the game ran at an average of 141 FPS, 24 1% low, with minimal stuttering that did not impact the experience a lot.
In the open world, however, things are quite different, as the game ran at an average of 107 FPS, 15 1% low with frequent stuttering. My system (i7-13700F, RTX 4080, 32 GB RAM) should be more than capable of handling Oblivion Remastered well, at least based on the system requirements, so it's clear that more work is needed on the optimization front.
I experienced the same even on my more powerful rig (Ryzen 7 9800X3D, RTX 5090). While the game runs smoothly in closed off areas, open areas and especially the open world are close to a stutter-fest.
The folks at Digital Foundry agree, too. Their PC video report, published over the weekend, praised the remaster's visuals but cited 'dire performance problems'.
Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia noted that history repeats itself, as constant hitches in the open world also plagued the original Oblivion. Even a lower frame rate cap to 60 FPS cannot really fix the issue. While hitches are very bad on the most powerful CPU available on the market, they're much worse on lower end CPUs. For example, the Ryzen 5 3600 exhibits 2 to 2 and a half longer hitches compared to the Ryzen 7 9800X3D in DF's testing.
The only real way to slightly improve the stuttering/hitching issue is to disable hardware-accelerated Lumen ray-traced global illumination. Unfortunately, this also brings a noticeable reduction in visual quality, especially when it comes to water reflections, ambient shadowing and lighting. Needless to say, the only real fixes can come with an official patch from Virtuos. We'll keep you updated on any such enhancements, of course.
Meanwhile, the game has already surpassed four million players.
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