Bethesda Softworks took the gaming world by storm on April 22, 2025, by shadow dropping The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered. At the time of writing, Oblivion Remastered has averaged over 100,000+ active players on Steam since its launch. However, with no official mod support from Bethesda, the fan community has picked up the slack over at Nexus Mods.
While Oblivion Remastered is receiving universal praise for its ambitious remake of the 2006 classic, not everything has gone exactly according to plan. Reports of frame stuttering and hitching have plagued even the most upgraded PC gaming builds so much that the most downloaded mod on Nexus Mods so far is a smoothness fix.
Titled “Ultimate Engine Tweaks (Anti-Stutters – Lower Latency – No Film Grain – No Chromatic Aberration – Lossless),” this user-created mod is not intended to supercharge frames per second, but rather, it intends to reduce the hitching and stuttering caused by 1% frame rate lows. With over 250,000+ unique downloads and over 390,000+ total downloads so far, it is safe to say fans of Oblivion Remastered are looking for some performance improvements.
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Digital Foundry wasn’t pleased with Oblivion Remastered’s performance
In order to better understand why so many people are turning to the Ultimate Engine Tweaks mod, it is important to analyze the underlying issues. One of the leading sources for gaming-based technical performance reviews, Digital Foundry, did not mince any words in their criticism of Oblivion Remastered’s base build, with a reviewer saying, “…[it] is perhaps one of the worst running games I’ve ever tested at Digital Foundry.”
In a video by Digital Foundry Video Producer, Alex Battaglia, parallels are drawn between 2006-era hardware struggling with Oblivion’s release to 2025-era hardware struggling with Oblivion Remastered’s upgrades. The main issue keyed in on is the game’s overall tendency to stutter and hitch when rendering new content in the game world’s grid.
“Running around Cyrodiil, in the new version of the game shows large frametime spikes even on high-end CPUs.”
They tested the high-end with a Ryzen 7 9800 X3D and still received annoying stutters, but that’s unfortunately not where the negative review ended. “Beyond the hitching, we are looking at one of the most bizarrely heavy games I have ever tested on the CPU and even GPU.”
This all sounds quite bad for Oblivion Remastered, but there’s at least the hope for performance patches in the future, as well as some DIY fixes from Nexus Mods.
Other popular mods for Oblivion: Remastered
Nexus Mods hosts user-generated mods passed through a virus scanner. Nexus Mods has long been a hub for TES mods, but as always, use at your own risk.
Nexus Mods to the rescue
Source: Nexusmods
Created by user P40L0, the Ultimate Engine Tweaks mod’s goal is, “to just include as many optimizations as possible in order to remove most stuttering, improve performance, reduce input latency and improve picture quality all without any visual loss not introducing glitches or crashes.”
It’s an ambitious task, but one that commenters feel was done well. While not everybody has seen performance improvements from using the mod, a number of commenters like juaxoo mention that, “the big stutters (more like hitches) are almost gone. I can finally immerse myself in the game. Thank you!” So, for anyone looking to improve their performance before Bethesda makes any patches to the game, this Nexus Mods fix might be for you.
