Oblivion Remastered “memory management” issue that makes the game run worse the more you play, but there’s a simple-yet-annoying fix

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered may look and play fantastically, but it also suffers from a slew of performance issues. On PC, players have resorted to downloading placebo mods that don’t actually help anything, and console players are just left to deal with it.

As it turns out, Oblivion Remastered suffers from a “memory management” issue on all consoles that causes the game to run worse the more you play it. While the game will reach its highest levels of performance the moment you start the game, it won’t take long for the game’s performance to get worse.

How to fix the Oblivion Remastered memory issue

Spotted by Digital Foundry, the current version of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered suffers from a “memory management” issue that means players playing for hours at a time will be hit with a severe performance penalty.

“Performance degrades with continuous play time on PS5 and Xbox,” explained performance analyt Tom Morgan. “For example, a completely fresh boot of the game—that is closing the software, reopening it and loading a save for the first time—will give you an often significantly higher frame rate.”

This performance degradation in Oblivion Remastered hits players when they’ve been playing the game for “15 minutes or more”, and is exacerbated by loading multiple save states. When playing through an area that hits 60fps in performance mode on a fresh boot, that same scenario can almost plummet into the high-30s.

“Travelling between areas or cycling through multiple save states is an easy way to overload the engine and tank performance,” Morgan continued. “This is true of all console platforms.”

Interestingly, the issue also means that new bugs can appear the longer players are exploring the game without restarting. Issues like Lumen lighting can break and horseback camera angles will also change for some reason.

The only way to fix performance is to restart the game, closing it properly, reopening the game and loading a save file. This isn’t the only Elder Scrolls game to do this. In fact, the infamous Skyrim PlayStation 3 port suffered from similar—albeit much worse—memory issues.

Hopefully, developer Virtuos is able to fix—or at least severely reduce—this issue, allowing for more stable performance in the future.