Fan Utilizes AI to Boost Oblivion Remastered PC Performance

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered launched to critical acclaim, bringing the classic RPG to modern platforms, but like many Unreal Engine 5 titles, it suffered from technical issues. Now, a fan has leveraged Claude to create a performance mod that significantly improves the game's stability.

When Oblivion Remastered released in April 2025, it was plagued by performance problems—a sadly common occurrence nowadays. More than a year later, these issues persist, with the latest patch (1.2) having been released back in June 2025 on Steam. Even after that update, significant performance problems remained.

Unsurprisingly, the community decided to take action. Reddit user LTSharp posted on the ChatGPT subreddit, sharing a video that compared the unpatched game running side-by-side with their patched version. While the raw frame rate increase isn't massive, LTSharp's patch drastically reduces stuttering, cutting hitches from 66 in the unpatched clip to just 11 in the patched version.

In their post, LTSharp explained that one cause of the rocky frametimes was that "the game was reconstructing the whole lighting of a scene in each frame even when nothing was changing, which was obviously a huge strain on CPU that had to parse all this work on a single thread."

They then ran Claude Opus 5.5 alongside Oblivion Remastered to identify the problems, and after two weeks, produced a patch. Importantly, this mod wasn't created by simply entering a quick prompt into Claude and calling it a day. LTSharp describes the process as "two weeks of intense work" with plenty of trial and error.

The main source of the performance boost appears to be spreading the workload across more CPU cores. In LTSharp's video, CPU utilization jumps from 35-40% to 50-60%, with about two extra threads engaged. And since these samples were recorded on a rig with a 5800X, there's likely more room for improvement.

AI usage is one of the biggest controversies in gaming right now, but this seems like a reasonable application of the technology. This was just a person who was disappointed that after "upgrading from a 2070 Super to a 9070 XT, the game continued to run poorly, with low fps and stuttering," and decided to use Claude to fix the problem, despite having no background in software development. Fortunately, they've posted their work on GitHub, and if someone with relatively little experience could reduce stutters this much, I imagine developers could create forks of this project that might eliminate them entirely.

This project stands in contrast to some of the more egregious uses of the technology recently, such as Epic delaying a Star Wars shooter to implement an AI-first policy where 'no hand-written code' is allowed. Likewise, an Xbox Business Analyst recently took to Twitter to rant about how the game industry is 'pretending' not to use AI, even making bold claims like, "If you're a game developer refusing to believe that AI has a place in your future, you should not be in the business of being a business."