Oblivion mainstream card performace

Firingsquad has a comparison of mainstream cards in oblivion. They have also tested if 512MB of memory makes a difference in oblivion. With a 7900GT card it's about 10% faster in some areas with 512MB memory on the card so not that much of a difference at all, I would have expected more. One interesting thing is that the Ati X1800 GTO is alot faster in foliage areas than 7600GT. I did expect the GTO would be faster but I thought that it would be faster in all situations where HDR was enabled, but that's not the case. 50% faster is alot and it's in the situations where the game is at it's slowest so for everyone who hasn't upgraded their graphics card for oblivion. Get the X1800 GTO if you can afford it.

The 7600GT card is 30% to 50% faster indoors where the game is fast enough even on cheaper cards... It could just be that there happens to be some shaders that favour ati cards outdoor and favour nvidia cards indoors. But if this keeps up for future games it seems like ati cards have an architecture that's much more suited for future games where there's alot of complex scenes. Then again that's what the X1x00 series was designed for, hehe.

Someone at ati spent a weekend fiddling with their drivers and figured out a way to run with both HDR and AA at the same time. So now there's a driver called "the chuck patch"... to download. It also has AFR crossfire mode for oblivion and that can make the game alot faster for crossfire owners. Ugh, I don't like the name chuck since it makes me think of Chuck Norris and all those stupid jokes about him and his leetness, coolness and [H]ardness

The chuck patch