The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion Remastered comes as quite a surprise. Launching nearly two decades after the original, the game was outsourced to a third-party studio. Instead of the Creation Engine or ID Tech, the remake uses the Unreal Engine 5. And we all know about UE5’s problems. Suffice it to say the game runs miserably, requiring frame generation for ray-traced visuals even on the highest-end PCs. Here’s our optimization guide for Elder Scrolls: Oblivion Remastered.
Windows/System Settings to Optimize
Enable Resizable BAR.
Turn on Game Mode.
Enable Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS) and Windowed Optimizations.
Use the Windows “High Performance” power profile and set your GPU power management mode to the same.
Overclock your GPU if you’re narrowly missing the 60 FPS mark.
Ensure you use the proper XMP/EXPO memory profile (if available).
The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion Remastered scales well across resolutions. We recorded an average of 37 FPS at 4K, 60 FPS at 1440p, and 80 FPS at 1080p using the ultra quality preset. Like most Unreal Engine 5 titles, the game is completely GPU-bound.
Test Setup
CPU: Intel Core i9-12900K @ 5.3 GHz.
Cooler: Arctic Liquid Freezer III 420.
GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4090 FE.
Motherboard: MSI PRO Z790-P WIFI.
Memory: 16 GB x2 @ 6000 MT/s CL30.
Graphics Presets
We see massive frame rate deltas between the four graphics presets. The ultra quality preset averages 56.5 FPS at 4K with quality upscaling. Lowering the settings grants the following figures:
High: 75 FPS (+33%).
Medium: 85 FPS (+50%).
Low: 97 FPS (+72%).
Ultra+ HW RT: 42.5 FPS (-25%).
Lumen Hardware Ray Tracing
Ray tracing enables Hardware Lumen:
Like traditional ray tracing algorithms, it replaces the distance fields with BVH which is rebuilt every frame.
Polygon intersection testing offers notable quality upgrades over distance fields.
However instead of pixels, it operates on probes, surface cache texels, and tiles.
Hardware Lumen works well with skinned meshes (moving objects), and produces more detailed reflections.
Ray tracing also uses Far Field traces which significantly improves distant lighting. It extends the global illumination and reflection coverage to 1 km from the camera.
Lumen Hardware Ray Tracing drastically improves visual quality, rendering highly detailed and accurate shadows, reflections, and ambient lighting. It’s up to 25% slower than software Lumen, but well worth the hit on high-end PCs
Hardware Lumen RT “Ultra” is only ~3% faster than “Low”Hardware RT vs. Software Lumen
Hardware ray tracing vs. software Lumen:
High-quality reflections with more color information and individual mesh detail.
Improved global illumination coverage with deeper light transmission, light bleeding, and finer geometry support.
Deeper shadows, including intricate ambient shadowing and finer geometry, including foliage and netting.
Global Illumination Quality
Global Illumination sets the lighting quality, including diffuse light, ambient shadows, occlusion, absorption, and reflection. Software Lumen is only 3-5% faster at lower quality than at the ultra option:
Ultra uses high-quality mesh distance fields for objects that individually calculate their lighting. This results in improved coverage for foliage, edges, crevices, and other fine geometry.
Up to 5% slower.
High reduces distance field detail, leading to loss of finer shadows from vegetation, surface intersections, ridges, edges, and crevices.
Up to 3% slower.
Medium behaves exactly like high, but lowers the intensity and range of light sources. Loss of light bleeding.
Up to 3% slower.
Low drastically reduces GI coverage and shadow detail. Perhaps uses DFAO and SSAO.
Software Lumen: Low disables mesh distance fields in favor of global distance fields. This removes ambient shadows from finer geometry and surface intersections.
Only 1-2% faster.
GI Quality
Lumen Explained: Is it Ray Tracing?
Lumen, by default, uses software ray tracing. This implementation includes Screen Tracing, Mesh Distance Fields, and Global Distance Fields, each used on different sections of the scene. The Final Gather is resolved by the Skylight, combining atmospheric and local lighting.
Screen Tracing is the first step in the Lumen pipeline.
It is conducted against objects in the depth buffer or screen space.
It is primarily used for object boundaries and crevices as a higher quality SSAO replacement.
Objects missed are served by the distance fields.
Mesh Distance Fields are 3D representations of an object (or set of combined objects).
Each point in an MDF stores the nearest distance to an object surface within the volume.
This is computed offline, and allows skipping the empty space in the MDF when ray marching.
Ray marching is an optimized form of ray tracing used to calculate diffuse lighting.
You march along a ray’s path in small steps.
At each step, the distance to the closest surface is calculated using an MDF.
Shading is applied if a surface is detected in the ray’s proximity.
The amount of shading applied depends on the distance to the object.
Upon intersection, shadow, diffuse, and reflection rays are cast outwards towards light sources or probes.
Mip-maps: High resolution MDFs for nearer objects, and scaled down variants for the rest
Global Distance Fields are abstract volumes obtained by combining all the MDFs in the scene.
The result is a bare-bones geometrical representation with minimal per-object detail.
The GDFs are used for large-scale or “global” lighting.
GDFs are cached and updated only when required.
Surface Cache forms Lumen’s backbone:
It stores the material and lighting data for various surface points, called cards.
Upon intersection (see SDFs), the lighting at a point is referenced from this cache.
It is calculated, cached, and updated gradually over frames.
Up to 12 cards per mesh/object
Indirect Lighting is calculated using light probes placed in the scene. The distribution is scant (1 per 4×4 tile). For each texel, data is interpolated from the four closest probes and from previous frames.
The Final Gather backs the software ray-tracing results. It is based on the Screen Space Radiance Cache.
It uses screen probes that are placed on pixels (screen space).
Screen Space Radiance probes operate at 1/16 the resolution.
Their results are interpolated spatially and temporally.
Using importance sampling, the lighting from the previous Screen Radiance Cache is reprojected into the current frame.
The Cache indexes the direction and the position of each frame’s rays, assisting temporal reprojection.
When it fails, the World Space Cache is used.
A separate, low-resolution World Radiance Cache is used for distant lighting.
They are placed in world space and operate at 1/256 the resolution.
They utilize temporal acumulation with gradual updation.
The World Space Radiance Cache has higher directional resolution but lower spatial resolution.
It works well in situations where all of the lighting in a room is coming from a small distant window.
The Screen Space probe rays are shorter, falling back to the World Space Cache upon misses.
Areas with detailed geometry use a denser probe grid, and ambient occlusion is added to the temporally sampled lighting for a refined result.
Light tracing is optimized by prioritizing sections with luminance in the last frame.
Lumen Hardware Ray Tracing improves GI coverage by lighting foliage, cracks, crevices, and increasing light travel distance. This improves soft shadows, light bleeding, and illumination of inter-object gaps.
Hardware Lumen is 20-25% slower than software Lumen.
High-quality GI option is 5% faster than ultra.
Medium and lower perform the same.
Hardware RT quality primarily sets the light travel distance and intensity.
This affects light bleeding and shadow depth.
HW RT vs. SW Lumen
Reflection Quality
Reflection Quality sets the reflection range and the surfaces capable of casting them. Software Lumen renders bland, mostly black-white reflections that make the game ~5% slower.
High slightly reduces reflection coverage.
Medium and below disable most glossy reflections.
SW RT Low reduces reflection detail.
Reflection Quality
Hardware RT renders highly detailed and vibrant reflections. The highest quality option is up to 8% slower than the lower options.
This is on top of the 20-25% hit incurred by enabling Hardware RT.
Lowering HW RT quality reduces the reflection LOD.
HW RT vs. SW Lumen
Unless you’re using the medium or low quality option, be sure to disable screen space reflections to eliminate reflection artifacts.
SSR Off vs. SSR On
Shadow Quality
Elder Scrolls: Oblivion Remastered uses Virtual Shadows that are quite taxing. The ultra-quality option is up to 20% slower than the lower options. The lower quality options include:
High slightly reduces the shadow map resolution.
It’s 16% faster than ultra and 6% slower than low.
Medium further reduces the resolution and disables most ambient shadows.
It’s 3% faster than high and 3% slower than low.
Low reduces map resolution to the lowest and disables shadow fog.
The console command “r.Shadow.Virtual.Enable 0” disabled virtual shadows in favor of traditional shadows, granting a 5-6% FPS boost.
Shadow Quality
Shadow Map Ray Tracing involves intersection testing against the virtual shadow map instead of actual geometry.
Shadow rays are cast from the from the surface towards the light source.
Along them, numerous samples are projected and tested against the shadow maps to produce soft shadowing and contact hardening.
The shadow ray distribution is based on the light radius or angle.
Hardware RT improves shadow quality by improving coverage for micro-geometry like foliage and vegetation. It also makes the silhouettes darker and more defined. In Hardware RT mode:
Ultra is up to 12% slower than the lower-quality shadow options.
Foliage & View Distance
Foliage Quality sets the LOD, and the density of grass, bushes, flowers, and other foliage. Reducing it can grant a 7-8% performance boost at the cost of repetitive foliage and increased pop-ins.
High and Medium (+4-5%) mostly reduce the foliage density.
Low disables shrubs and bushes.
Foliage Quality
View Distance adjusts the render distance of in-game geometry. Like most Nanite-powered games, lowering it barely impacts performance.
View Distance Low vs. Ultra
Nanite is among the core highlights of Unreal Engine 5. It has allowed for an unprecedented increase in geometric detail without unrealistic polygon counts or memory budgets. This is achieved by adopting cluster-based LOD scaling.
Cluster groups of varying detail are generated for every mesh + Different mesh parts are also rendered at different LODs
The viewing angle or viewport determines the LOD to ensure that the highest perceptible detail is rendered for each part of the mesh. This involves using high-resolution cluster groups for some in-focus and low-resolution groups for distant or partially visible objects.
The LOD changes with the viewport. The updated cluster groups are streamed in and out of storage in real time.
The screen resolution is also used to determine the LOD as the subtlest details are often lost on small or low-resolution displays. These minute triangles are culled to save resources without a (noticeable) loss in detail.
Nanite pre-calculates all the cluster LOD hierarchies beforehand, storing them in the memory. The GPU accesses this data using DMA (Direct Memory Access) to avoid pipeline stalls or pop-ups.
Effects & Post Processing Quality
Effects Quality adjusts multiple parameters, including material quality (mainly terrain), detail (trees), material blending, and other special effects. It dramatically impacts the game’s performance, lowering the average by up to 10%:
High primarily reduces vegetation detail: 5% faster.
Medium reduces material and blending quality: 8% faster.
Low further reduces vegetation detail: 10% faster.
Effects Quality
Post Processing enables various late-stage shaders, including bloom, blur effects, tonemapping, adaptation, ambient occlusion, etc. Most of these effects are disabled at medium or low. The performance impact varies from 2-4%.
Post Processing Quality
Hair & Cloth Quality
Oblivion Remastered uses a mix of planar mesh and hair strands for character heads. However, lowering the quality barely impacts the visuals or the performance. You only get slightly blurrier textures.
Cloth Quality sets the physics quality of certain cloth meshes, affecting the amount of movement possible. You can leave it at the highest quality option unless you have an old CPU.
Upscaling & Frame Generation
Upscaling grants massive performance boosts in GPU-bound titles like Oblivion Remastered. The DLSS quality preset is 60% faster than native 4K, while performance mode extends it to a whopping 97%. However, the game uses DLSS 3.7 by default. Upgrade it to DLSS 4 using our guide.
DLAA vs. DLSS Q vs. DLSS P
Frame Generation is a given if you plan to use hardware ray tracing. Fortunately, it is available with DLSS and FSR. It massively improves frame rates, yielding a 60-80% FPS boost on our setup at 4K.
Elder Scrolls Oblivion Remastered: VRAM Usage
Elder Scrolls Oblivion Remastered uses up to 13 GB of graphics memory at 4K “Ultra.” Stepping down to 1440p brings it below 10 GB, while 1080p utilizes up to 9 GB.
Hardware RT reduces the VRAM usage by 500-1000 MB, as does decreasing the graphics quality to high. Unfortunately, this is another UE5 game that demands at least 10 GB of graphics memory.
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