The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered is a fascinating idea: to bring the original game engine to the modern era, with strategic changes made to gameplay – but with the lion’s share of the actual remastering handled by an Unreal Engine 5 wrapper. The concept is nothing new, of course. We’ve seen it work out beautifully in a game like Bluepoint’s Shadow of the Colossus and we’ve seen it work less than optimally in something like the Grand Theft Auto Trilogy Definitive Edition. Bethesda Game Studios‘ collaboration works in the context of delivering a fully modernised take on the classic original, but problems from the original game persist into the remaster, while performance overall has massive, highly distracting problems. You may be fine with that if you’re OK with the ‘jank’ historically connected to BGS games, but we are not.

From a video perspective, Digital Foundry has already delivered its first offering – a new episode of one of our favourite recurring series, the PC retro time capsule. Here, we played the beginnings of Oblivion Remastered using both 2025 and OG 2006 code. Today’s RTX 5090 running the game maxed at 4K resolution is stacked up against the launch version of the original Oblivion running on a Pentium D paired with a Radeon X1800 XT. In a 52-minute episode, you get to appreciate the extent of the remastering work by seeing just how far gaming graphics have come in the last 19 years.

The limited polygon budgets, basic effects and lighting struggle to produce some kind of approximation of a real world – which proves to be computationally challenging even on what was considered to be high-end hardware way back when. My playthrough on the original game falls short of John Linneman’s experience on the remastered version by just about every measurable criteria. All of Unreal Engine 5’s effects – Nanite virtual geometry, Lumen global illumination and virtual shadow maps are deployed, delivering a far more realistic, appealling world. With that said though, there does seem to be something ‘off’ about the lighting: the radical transformation here is perhaps that one step too far away from the remarkable ambience of the original. Performance is highly variable, stutter is commonplace, and looking at John’s matching gameplay in the new version, I had my concerns.

Looking to get a flavour of BGS/Virtuos remastering effort? Here’s how Oblivion Remastered stacks up against the original game.Watch on YouTube

Once I went hands-on with the new version, these concerns turned out to be well founded – there are severe problems here that must be addressed. When The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion launched in 2006, it challenged PC hardware with its big open world and shader model three graphics – but the game’s performance characteristics have been largely forgotten today. Go back and play it on period-appropriate hardware and it’s easy to see that Oblivion had its own stuttering problems. Walking around the game world induced big stutters each and every time a new world grid would load and deload in front and behind the player. History repeats itself with this week’s brand-new remaster – and it’s perhaps one of the worst-running games I’ve ever tested for Digital Foundry.

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.

Oblivion Remastered PC: Impressive Remastering, Dire Performance Problems

Oblivion Remastered on PC – it looks bad and it is bad. We’re looking at the console versions right now and there are profound problems there too.Watch on YouTube

Compounding the issue is that most people don’t have a highly capable CPU, meaning that the stuttering is much, much worse on mainstream parts. A Ryzen 5 3600 sees already poor frame-times on the 9800X3D rise by 2x to 2.5x the duration, resulting in catastrophic performance. Granted, the Ryzen 5 3600 is old hat now, so many gamers may have migrated onto more capable mainstream parts – but even at a midway point between our two tested processors, you’re looking at an awful 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.

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Lowering other settings reveals comparatively insignificant improvements with a massive loss of quality. Reducing everything to the bare minimum, CPU-limited performance only increases by around 10 percent on average, with only a very slight improvement to the stuttering problems and a gigantic downgrade to game visuals. Optimised settings suggest we can end up with a more optimal experience, but that’s simply impossible with this game as it stands. I can’t quite understand how CPU performance on this one is so dreadful and why settings adjustments help so little. At the lowest settings, the game is not attractive – and is arguably worse in some respects than the 2006 original. This is just bad.

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.

CPU-limited performance in Olivion Remastered reveals inconsistent performance no matter how good your processor is – with mainstream parts faring badly. | Image credit: Digital Foundry

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.

The rest of the settings operate in line with the standards set by UE5’s out-of-the-box settings menu. Basically, the high setting runs a good deal better than the maxed-out epic preset with minimal quality loss for each element. Dropping down from epic to high improves performance by anything up to 38 percent in my testing with little (if any) loss to quality while using hardware Lumen, so this is definitely the way to go.

And that was supposed to be the end of this piece – but just before publication, a new patch landed for the PC version of the game, meaning we had to check our data for changes. This presented more of a challenge than expected as on the Game Pass version used for testing, upscaling options disappeared. On as close to like-for-like testing that we could get, the same stuttering issues presented – so let’s be clear here – until Bethesda and Virtuos address the foundational CPU-based problems in this port, there is no route to what we would class as acceptable performance for a modern PC game.