suggestions for resolution and game setting

[jbowen529]

game said it didnt recognize my graphics card and set to 640x480 i just got ASUS ROG Strix G16 , 16” 16:10 FHD 165Hz Display, NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 4060, Intel Core i7-13650HX, 16GB DDR5, what do you all think i should set it to?

[4K_240hz_MLED]

1920x1080, ultra settings, HDR (but MSAA gets turned off), fullscreen; for vsync, it's really up to you, although most people recommend it on. when you're in the main menu, you can further adjust extra settings to your liking. i think the self-shadows are somewhat broken by default, so if i were you, i'd just disable them. you can obviously force enable MSAA or other forms of anti-aliasing in Nvidia Control Panel if you really want it and HDR.

this game isn't well optimized at all, so it won't really utilize your specs that much; Oblivion is a heavily CPU bound game which typically only uses 1 single CPU core. while it does technically support hyperthreading and SMT, it won't really give you much benefits and also the clock speed is the most determining factor for performance. IPC, cache, architecture, TDP, and other factors of single core performance don't matter as much.

you should also be warned this game can stutter, crash, freeze, and lag a lot at no fault of your own hardware and configurations. even if you use mods to address those issues, they can still happen to you albeit much less frequency and less intensity. Oblivion also suffers from a memory leak and since you're on a gaming laptop, i recommend you use a cooling pad or to slightly elevate when playing to prevent thermal throttling.

in terms of your other specs, it doesn't really matter because this is a 32-bit game and even with mods, you'll never really use much SRAM. from my benchmarking, Oblivion only uses like not even 384MB VRAM at FHD, although to be fair MSi Afterburner doesn't indicate if that is actually used or both used and allocated VRAM. you'll only really push your GPU for this game if you use demanding graphical mods.

oh right, forgot to mention that the game will noticeably lag more when there's even just a few NPCs around. this is due to radiant AI, which is the first and only Bethesda game to have it and it is a laggy piece of crap that while was innovative for its time hasn't aged too well. newer games have a more simplified AI and can use multiple CPU cores (and individual cores effectively), so they don't have this issue.

you'll get more lag in the cities partially due to high polygon count, combined with the larger amount of NPCs. you can easily mitigate this by lowering the sliders for actor, item, and object in the settings in-game, although the cities will still lag more and if there's too many NPCs lag still occurs. there are sadly no mods i've found that simplifies the AI nor reduces the polygon count for the cities, so you just have to hope you get good fps.

[jbowen529]

Thank you for such a specific answer I'm fairly new to pc gaming and appreciate the details My desk has a bezel so I have the back of the laptop elevated about an inch and the cooling fans havent started to sing yet so I must not be pushing it too much thanks again for taking the time to help me