The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered was excellent when it came out, bringing the beloved RPG to the modern era, but just like many other games running on Unreal 5, it was a technical mess. However, a fan has used Claude to create a performance mod that improves the game's performance.
When The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered came out back in April 2025, it was absolutely plagued with performance issues – something that's unfortunately become pretty normal these days. But, more than a year after launch, the performance issues are still there, with patch 1.2, the most recent on Steam, coming out all the way back in June 2025. And even after that patch, there were still significant performance problems.
It's little wonder, then, that the community would try to take matters into their own hands. Reddit user LTSharp posted on the ChatGPT subreddit, with a video showing the unpatched game running side-by-side with their patched version. And, while the raw increase to the frame rate isn't huge, LTSharp's patch greatly reduces the stutter, going from 66 hitches in the unpatched clip to just 11 in the patched version of the game.
In their post, LTSharp says one of the reasons for 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 and tasked it with identifying the problems, and after two weeks, ended up with a patch. Crucially, this mod wasn't created by just entering a quick prompt into Claude, hitting enter, and then calling it a day. LTSharp describes the process as "two weeks of intense work" with a lot of trial and error involved.
It seems like the biggest source of the improved performance is spreading the work to more CPU cores. At any given moment in LTSharp's video, CPU utilization jumps from 35-40% to 50-60% utilization, with around two extra threads (workers) engaged. And given that these samples were recorded on a rig with a 5800X, there's probably some more room for improvement there.
AI usage is one of the biggest controversies in gaming right now, but this seems to be a decent use of the technology. This was just a person who was disappointed that after "upgrading from 2070 Super to 9070 XT, the game continued to run poorly, with low fps and stuttering," and decided to use Claude to fix the problem, despite not having any background in software development. Luckily, they've posted their work on GitHub, and if someone who's relatively inexperienced was able to reduce stutters by this much, I imagine there may be developers who can create forks of this project that might be able to eliminate them altogether.
This project is in contrast to some of the most egregious uses of the technology recently, like Epic, which recently delayed a Star Wars shooter to implement an AI-first policy where 'no hand-written code' is allowed. Likewise, an Xbox Business Analyst recently went on Twitter and ranted about how the game industry is 'pretending' to not use AI, and even made 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."