Digital Foundry Direct—our weekly series spotlighting the newest developments in tech and gaming—took a close look at the freshly released Oblivion Remastered patch 1.2. This update is positioned as a major step forward, promising fixes for performance problems, crashes, and a range of other bugs that have bothered the game since launch. Unfortunately, Tom Morgan’s testing points to a disappointing reality on consoles: many of the most pressing issues still haven’t been cleared up.
For our part, Bethesda’s patch notes lay out improvements across multiple gaming systems, fixes for frame drops in four named areas, better overall frame-time behavior, and fewer interruptions while exploring the open world… so we fired up Oblivion with patch 1.2 installed to examine several stubborn trouble spots and check how things look two and a half months down the line.
As we saw when Alex reviewed the PC patch two weeks ago, almost all of the key issues we previously flagged remain present on consoles. That includes sharp drops in performance, crashes, and a steady decline over time. It’s worth breaking down each of these three problems so it’s clear what exactly is going wrong—and why we can’t assume every one will be straightforward to solve in later updates.
For most players, the biggest performance issue shows up in the 60fps mode, where you’d naturally expect a consistent 60fps target. Yet as you move between different “cells” in the original game world (the underlying setup Unreal Engine 5 builds on), the new patch still produces noticeable stutters. On PS4 Pro, these pauses can spike to around 240ms—nearly one quarter of a second. Even so, actual frame rates generally sit somewhere around the 40–60fps band across PS5, PS5 Pro, and Xbox Series X.
- 0:00:00 Introduction
- 0:00:51 News 1: Sony introduces power-saving mode for PS5
- 0:18:30 News 2: Cyberpunk Xbox VRR is “working” as intended
- 0:24:12 News 3: Oblivion Remastered 1.2 update makes little difference to console performance
- 0:41:21 News 4: Pure Pool Pro delivers native 8K balls on PS5 Pro
- 0:48:07 News 5: Fallout: Bakersfield trailer highlights GZDoom visuals
- 0:57:54 News 6: Crytek shares a 25-year anniversary video
- 1:14:27 Supporter Q1: Are there meaningful differences between windowed, windowed borderless, and fullscreen modes in Windows?
- 1:20:36 Supporter Q2: Will GTA 6 include a 60fps mode exclusively on PS5 Pro?
- 1:28:08 Supporter Q3: Why is Microsoft ending video purchases on Xbox?
- 1:33:24 Supporter Q4: What will the Switch 2 die shrink look like?
- 1:36:19 Supporter Q5: Is Nintendo fundamentally against TAA/DLSS?
- 1:42:27 Supporter Q6: Does the overlap in console design and the fading of exclusives suggest the end of the console war?
- 1:51:36 Supporter Q7: Have you received any unsolicited dock pictures?
When we run straight comparisons between the previous build and version 1.2, the outcomes can also feel unclear. Some tests come out better on 1.2, while others turn out worse for reasons that aren’t obvious. Performance in Oblivion also swings noticeably even during a single session as you travel across different terrain—again pointing to streaming behavior in the engine that we can’t reproduce with perfect consistency between trials. To reduce those moving variables as much as possible, we relaunched Oblivion before each run, closing the game to the system menu and then reopening it. Even with that controlled approach, the frame rate still isn’t reliably predictable.
Oblivion Remastered also appears to be affected by a memory leak that can eventually trigger crashes during longer play sessions, and that’s something we can test with relative ease—so we tried it on PS5. We loaded 20 saves in a row, one after another, and the moment we loaded the 20th save, the game crashed back to the PS5 system menu, matching what happened during the earlier patch. Importantly, if we force-close Oblivion and boot it up again fresh, then opening that same 20th save suddenly works without issue. Memory leak or not, the problem we identified in our original May tests is still not fixed.
The last—and possibly most aggravating—concern involves performance dropping off after you load multiple saves back-to-back. Testing again on PS5, we “primed” a run by loading several saves consecutively, and then we ran our usual performance measurements. Under these conditions, certain areas get much worse: in the Planes of Oblivion, it can be up to 20fps lower than what we see after a clean start.
Oddly enough, some display and camera settings seem to carry over from whichever save was loaded last. For example, during the Chestnut Handy Stable test, the lighting for Lumen’s global illumination and ambient occlusion looked entirely different when the run was “charged,” resembling what we see in the Planes of Oblivion—which could be part of why performance falls off in the first place. Camera-related issues continue as well, with the viewpoint sitting too high while riding a horse after loading multiple saves in quick succession.
Overall, this is a major letdown for Oblivion fans on consoles and may suggest that at least some of the game’s core problems are built in, especially since they’ve not been resolved even after months of patching. This also isn’t the sort of triumphant homage to a Bethesda classic that we were hoping for, and the long wait for an update hasn’t produced a meaningful improvement.
Elsewhere in the Direct, we covered the PS5 power saving mode, which points to the company’s broader portable ambitions—along with a variety of other stories.
We also took plenty of supporter questions, including whether Grand Theft Auto 6 could include a 60fps mode on PS5 Pro, how windowed, borderless, and fullscreen modes differ in Windows, and Nintendo’s “institutional” reluctance toward technologies like TAA and DLSS. If you’d like your questions answered, we encourage you to visit the DF Supporter Program and join in with our great community.