Hardware RTGI strikes again
Even if you're running the most powerful hardware around, the stuttering is egregious, dragging down the experience to the point where I really don't understand how this was considered good enough for release. And beyond the hitching, we are looking at one of the most bizarrely resource-intensive games I've ever tested - so even if you're OK with lurching stutter, you'll be turning down the settings just to keep the average frame-rate looking acceptable.
Stuttering or hitching is typically a CPU-based problem, which can often be mitigated by ramping up visual quality, lowering frame-rate and attempting to minimise CPU-based stutter via buffering. In effect, you're masking CPU problems via FPS caps, using the excess processing time to increase visual fidelity instead. I tried that by using ultra high resolution with a frame-rate cap but not even the mighty Ryzen 7 9800X3D - the fastest gaming CPU money can buy - can master this game's stuttering problems. This is a core issue when a key part of the gameplay is found in wandering and meandering around the environments - I found no way to get smooth traversal, fundamentally impacting the experience.
If you're looking for a higher average frame-rate, this is where we'd typically chime in with optimised settings - but the issue is that there's only one setting we could find that could make a difference. CPU performance improves by disabling hardware RT-based Lumen global illumination.
By opting for the software alternative (as used on the consoles), performance can improve by around 35 percent on average. Technically, it's a nice improvement when CPU-limited, but it makes the game look worse in many areas. Water reflections are visibly poorer, while ambient shadowing and lighting is heavily downgraded - so there's no free lunch here. The bad news is that even with this mitigation in place, the amount of duration of the game's stuttering does not improve.
Digital Foundry says that Oblivion Remastered runs exceptionally poorly on PC - saying it's one of the worst-performing games they've ever tested.
www.eurogamer.net
Now, there may well be a lot of Elder Scrolls fans out there that don't mind janky stutters and will want better GPU performance as the game also manages to be highly taxing on graphics hardware too. I do have some recommendations. First of all, stick with hardware Lumen, because the lighting it produces on vegetation is a lot better, to the point where software Lumen can look more like a screen-space effect.
Next, drop the hardware lighting mode quality down to low. This setting lights reflections purely with the surface cache instead of hit lighting, so objects in reflections lose specularity and their ray-traced shadows - but they will run around 16 percent better than every other settings when reflections are in full view on-screen. It's worth it for mid-range GPUs, though low-end graphics cards should probably use software Lumen on high, despite the drawbacks.