Dual-core Performance Mountains

The #1 question we’ve received when it comes to CPU performance with Oblivion is without a doubt if dual-core processors are capable of outperforming older single-core processors in this game. And if so, by how much? Bethesda has already gone on record stating that the game would take advantage of dual-core while it was still in development, and we’ve all seen by now how much Quake 4 benefits from dual-core processors, so everyone’s been eager to see if Oblivion yields similar performance improvements with multi-core CPUs.

One thing a lot of dual-core users have been reporting are performance enhancements with the following tweaks:

bUseThreadedBlood=1
bUseThreadedMorpher=1
bUseThreadedTempEffects=1
bUseThreadedParticleSystem=1
bUseMultiThreadedTrees=1
bUseMultiThreadedFaceGen=1
iNumHavokThreads=5
iThreads=9
iOpenMPLevel=10

We couldn’t find one case where the aforementioned settings improved performance for dual-core CPUs, the performance impact in our testing by turning on/off these settings was negligible for the most part. One thing we noticed is that a couple of those tweaks, bUseMultiThreadedTrees=1 and bUseMultiThreadedFaceGen=1 are already turned on by default, regardless of whether you have a dual-core processor or not. It’s possible that our demos just aren’t capable of taking advantage of these settings, or perhaps they have nothing to do with multi-threading at all, as we certainly saw a performance increase with dual-core CPUs:

Oblivion – Direct3D

Oblivion Performance 800x600x32
CPU	Min FPS	Max FPS
X2 4800+	96	140
A64 4000+	81	120
X2 4200+	88	127
A64 3500+	75	111

Notes

The dual-core Athlon 64 X2 4800+ outperformed the similarly configured Athlon 64 4000+ by a whopping 16% at 800x600. We also ran tests at the slightly lower clock speed of 2.2GHz to see how much of an impact the slower clock speed and smaller cache plays a role on performance. Here the X2 4200+ outran the A64 3500+ CPU by a slightly slimmer margin of 13%. However, once Oblivion’s image quality settings are cranked up, and the screen resolution increases the performance difference between the various systems is insignificant.