A mod made with Claude speeds up Oblivion Remastered on PC
IA en un minuto newsroom · Editor: Jon Elgezabal
In 30 seconds
LTSharpe has uploaded a free mod to GitHub that makes Oblivion Remastered smoother on PC without touching its graphics, and credits Claude, from Anthropic, with the technical side. With the test machine, the Imperial City at 4K gains 41% and long hitches drop to 4.8 from 19.5. It is still a beta checked on one PC, and if the graphics card is the bottleneck the gain is barely noticeable.
GitHub user LTSharpe has put out a free, open-source mod that makes The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered run more smoothly on PC, and says Claude, Anthropic's AI model, did the technical work.
The project is named Oblivion Remastered Performance Fix, and its first version appeared on October 17. Its page credits Claude with measuring where the game was getting bogged down, the reverse engineering (studying how the program works on the inside), the fixes, the tests and the documentation, all done in Claude Code, Anthropic's tool for programming with Claude. LTSharpe chose the goal and laid down the rules, the main one being that the look of the game must never change, took every decision and tried out each version.
As reported by Wccftech, LTSharpe explained on Reddit that the game kept running poorly on their machine, which has a Ryzen 7 5800X, even after swapping a GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER for a Radeon RX 9070 XT, and then turned to Claude Opus 5.5. The work took roughly two and a half weeks, LTSharpe has no professional training as a programmer, and the outcome is about 40 optimizations to the game's engine.
The project page explains that Oblivion Remastered runs two engines at the same time: the original one from 2006 handles the game world, while Unreal Engine 5 renders it. Several tasks in that chain depend on a single processor thread, and when that thread is saturated, the whole game has to wait.
On the test PC, a flight over the Imperial City at 4K with frame generation goes from 72 to 102 frames per second, 41% more, and hitches of 50 milliseconds or longer fall from 19.5 to 4.8 per flight. In the streets of Cheydinhal, also with frame generation, it climbs from 64 to 91 frames per second. When walking out through a door, the slowest frame drops from 187 to 95 milliseconds, and menus open sooner.
The mod does not reduce any setting or cut the view distance: it alters the way the engine carries out its work, not what appears on screen. Nor does it modify the game files, since every change happens in memory during play; it is installed by unzipping a file into the game folder and can be downloaded from GitHub and from Nexus Mods. The Steam version is the one that has been tested, and the Game Pass version is at an experimental stage. It is a beta tried so far on a single PC, with a Ryzen 7 5800X and a Radeon RX 9070 XT, and the author warns that the gain varies from one machine to another: it is biggest when the processor is what slows the game down, and when the graphics card is the limit the frame rate stays more or less where it was.
On October 18, LTSharpe released a second beta, version 1.1.0, with more fixes: among them, one for a bug in the first version that made the clouds vanish after a lightning strike, and another for a flaw in the game itself that left characters' robes and capes stretched out. In it, LTSharpe thanks the users who sent in results from NVIDIA, Linux and Mac systems.
Why it matters · analysis and opinion
The case shows a division of roles that many companies are already trying out: the person sets the goal, draws the limits and checks each version, and the model takes on the heavy technical work. Until now, digging into the guts of someone else's closed program to speed it up was the territory of specialists with years of experience; here it was directed by someone with no professional programming training, in a few weeks. What is missing is what separates a demonstration from a product: tests on many different machines and someone who responds when the game is updated. The most useful part for anyone who wants to copy it lies in the method: one clear rule that cannot be broken, repeatable measurements before and after, and all the code in the open for others to review.
Source: LTSharpe (GitHub) · Written with the help of AI: how we make the news
