Oblivion Remastered’s most popular performance mod is actually all placebo, and it doesn’t fix anything whatsoever

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered runs an updated version of the original 2006 under a gorgeous Unreal Engine 5 graphical overhaul. While the game is a brilliant return to Cyrodil—despite keeping some of the original designer’s major regrets—there are some very glaring performance issues.

As soon as the game released, modders flocked to release a slew of performance improvements for the game with the most popular mod dubbed “Ultimate Engine Tweaks”. With over 630,000 downloads at the time of writing, many would assume that the mod was a great addition to the game. However, it turns out the mod is just placebo.

Oblivion Remastered Ultimate Engine Tweaks doesn’t do anything

In the latest episode of Digital Foundry’s weekly podcast, DF Direct, PC gaming expert Alex Battaglia looked into the mod. Digital Foundry creator Richard Leadbetter explained that this investigation is the start of looking into the team’s “long-running theory” that the vast majority of .ini mods don’t do anything at all.

For the investigation, Digital Foundry investigated two mods: the aforementioned Ultimate Engine Tweaks and Oblivion BSA Uncompressor, a mod that uncompresses BSA files to “reduce stuttering”. Unfortunately, both of these mods do nothing, offering little more than placebo for PC players.

The most pressing part of the investigation focuses on Ultimate Engine Tweaks, a mod that changes the Unreal Engine .ini file for Oblivion Remastered to offer “anti-stutters, lower latency” and other changes. Every time an Unreal Engine 5 game releases, a .ini mod is quickly released to fix performance, but do they actually do anything.

“One thing that you see typically after every Unreal Engine release, and even other games, is that there are mods that come out,” Battaglia said. “These ini tweaks—an ini is a file that games like Unreal use to set variables as the game is starting or sometimes while they’re playing that change things like graphical options, loading behaviours, they’ll change a variety of things. And these always come out… and they purport to do a lot of things like reduce latency, reduce hitching and stutters a game can have, reducing the GPU burden and load without affecting visuals.”

“I didn’t want to test them because I couldn’t imagine them doing anything… but after testing them A/B… it runs the same.”

DIGITAL FOUNDRY ANALYST ALEX BATTAGLIA

Alongside exploring the actual mod file’s amended .ini file—which changes very little that could actually affect performance—Battaglia created numerous benchmark runs to test whether the so-called mod was actually doing anything. As it turns out, it’s essentially placebo.

With the mod installed, benchmark runs without the altered ini file were “essentially a mirror run” which actually “runs a little worse in the beginning”. While there are minor differences in performance at specific moments, that’s simple variance, and the raw numbers reach the same conclusion.

“I’m gonna say that this mod, and these style of mods, I’ve always thought they did nothing, and I didn’t want to test them because I couldn’t imagine them doing anything… but after testing them A/B… it runs the same,” the performance analyst said.

The analysts also tried benchmark runs with the BSA Uncompressor mod which also only had minor differences that “peter out over the course of the run to being exactly equal” with frame pacing, hitches and performance drops occurring at the exact same time during the benchmark.

For BSA Uncompressor, Battaglia noticed a “1.9% improvement” in performance, a percentage that is not only largely negligible, but also very similar to an average benchmark’s “run-to-run variance” on a hardware test. While this mod was known to assist in the original 19-year-old game, Oblivion Remastered is running on much better hardware that can actually brute-force its way through the original’s issues.

“We’ve always assumed they don’t work,” Leadbetter added. “Going back all the way to Arkham Knight, that was where the ini mod thing really gained traction because the game was so, so bad. Fundamentally, that was because the PC port really didn’t respect the fact that the PC doesn’t have unified memory, so there was a lot of problems going there, which no manner of Ini mod is going to fix.”

At the end of the day, there may be some ini files that do work, but a large number of them are just placebo. Unless you’re LowSpecGamer using config files to unlock hilariously low graphics options to run on absolute toaster hardware, it’s better to just turn your settings down, or just ignore the hard data and use these config tweaks to your heart’s content.