Oblivion Remastered stuttering like crazy on your PC? A Reddit guide promises to fix FPS drops

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If you're one of the many keen gamers who picked up Oblivion Remastered when it arrived earlier this week, you may have been encountering seriously poor frame rates on PC.

There have been multiple complaints about stuttering performance and extremely sluggish FPS since the remake was unleashed, with a lot of blame directed at Unreal Engine 5 (which the game uses for its graphical overhaul).

Well, if you're in this boat, you might be interested to learn that an 'Oblivion Remastered performance guide' has appeared on Reddit (crafted by Sharyat). It's getting some big thumbs-up from players who were previously being driven mad by low, stuttering frame rates (particularly in outdoor areas).

You can check it out in full, embedded above, but here's the short version (complete with a few extras from elsewhere thrown in).

Apparently, the most important thing to bear in mind is that there's a bug which means that performance craters if you change the graphics settings while actually in a game session.

Never do this, we're advised - if you want to tinker with the graphics options, do so from the main menu, then load into your saved game afterwards. In short: Do not mess around with the graphics settings when actually in a game session.

If this warning reaches you too late, and you've already done this, with the stuttering not going away, you may want to reinstall Oblivion Remastered. Or at least some folks have done so, and found that it cured their FPS blues (just be careful to make your graphics adjustments from the main menu going forward).

Another apparent important step is to: Delete or rename sc.pcl.dll (which might be called sl.pcl.dll on your PC).

This is a common troubleshooting step, apparently - it's mentioned as a resolution for Oblivion crashing, too - though no explanation is given as to why exactly. This is an NVIDIA DLL file, and you'll find it here: C:Program Files (x86) > Steam > Steamapps > Common > Oblivion Remastered > Engine > Plugins > Marketplace > NVIDIA > DLSS > Streamline > Binaries > ThirdParty > Win64.

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Graphics settings and mods

Turning to the graphics settings themselves, Sharyat shares their choices in the post, but notes that most of these aren't to do with resolving stuttering - they're just about getting a smooth frame rate on their rig (RTX 3060, Intel Core i9-9900KF).

Still, one suggestion we're banking is a good one to follow is to turn Lumen Hardware RT off and make sure Lumen Software RT Quality is set to low. (Don't forget, do all this from the main menu).

You could go further and use the Engine.ini file from the Lumen Begone mod over at Nexus Mods to disable this lighting system entirely (one of many such mods that have arrived for Oblivion Remastered).

Sharyat recommends the Ultimate Engine Tweaks mod for better performance, again an Engine.ini replacement, and the most popular download for Oblivion Remastered over at Nexus Mods currently, so it seems a sound bet.

Note that you don't need to replace the Engine.ini file to resolve stuttering, but doing so should give you what might be a healthy frame rate boost. Sharyat managed to achieve an increase of 30 FPS in outdoor areas with this method, which seems well worth having, but as ever, your mileage may vary.

As a final note, those with Intel Arc GPUs should be sure to download the latest graphics driver, which only emerged yesterday and comes with official support for Oblivion Remastered. Running the game without that - on top of all the mentioned possible issues above - is likely to provide a wonky experience on an Intel Alchemist or Battlemage graphics card.