http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_1.html (several pages)
Not being a serious gamer I ask you for an opinion on this link.
I cannot understand how the FPS are so low on 6800GT(unless this is just a standard card) However using Nividea Forceware drivers on the Gainward 6800 GS GLH and the 7800GT Oblivion is quite playable. Apparently Oblivion automatically sets specs to max on setup. However Oblivion is not without faults and I await your comments.Tks
cheers
The typical rule for how powerful a GeForce graphics card is given the letters at their end (lowest power to highest power):
LE < GS < GT < GTX
I've not found an exact rule, but from my experience, the GT has lower clock speed, the GS has less pipelines opened and a lower clock speed, and the LE has even less pipelines, less clock speed and less features.
You have tools to increase clock speed and open up pipelines, but often cards are given the letters at the end because they were made to be GTXs but they were defective at certain clockspeeds or certain pipelines were broken, so you can rarely max them to a GTX level. Also there are sometimes physical constants involved in the specifications of lower graphics cards, which simply can not be over come.
The type of memory involved is a big factor as well, for such powerful things as graphics cards, latency is a big issue for graphics card as well as clock speed, a rough rule of thumb for how good memory is (but not always true actually, you need to check out the exact specifications and compare it to a benchmark program)
GDDR4* > GDDR3 > DDR3 > GDDR2** > DDR2 > DDR
* Only available on certain ATi products at the moment, it's major feature over GDDR3 is power savings, so its clock speed can be made to be much higher
** I'm not sure this is actually a formal type of memory, from my experience things which claim to be GDDR2 are simply high quality DDR2 memory.
Anyway, that tweak guide is brilliant for getting the most out of your graphics card, not only for oblivion but the start really helps for games in general.
I have a lowly 6600 card (but over clocked) and am able to play Oblivion on reasonable setting (1280 x 960 with a few nice features turned on and distance of things generally at medium), but it took quite a lot of tweaking to get that kind of performance out of it. Benchmarks are run at stock settings, don't think this is unfair because you can equally tweak for a 8800 and get much better performance out of it (there are even higher graphical settings that the benchmark hasn't used).
It's not that the game isn't playable on lower end graphics cards (6600+ and x1600+, even lower if you get a patch called oldblivion) it's just that you can't really appreciate it's beuaty without something with a bit more kick to it, and single graphics cards almost always provide a better performance gain per the amount of extra cost you are spending on them vs. dual graphics cards (twice the price, 15% - 60% extra power)
