Which card to run Oblivion?

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Swingline(Red)

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The title pretty much says it all...I'm looking to find which is the best single card to run Oblivion on. The debate is mainly between the 8800GTX, 9800GTX and 3870x2.

I will be using Qarl's texture pack and other sorts of graphical mods.
 
Alright...I was thinking that, considering the game was designed to run on ATI architecture (xbox360), but I didn't know if that still held true. Do you have any benchmarks that show this?
 
I played it a couple times through, probably at least 200 hours in the game, on a single 7900GT, so I'm assuming even an 8800GTS 512MB would work fine.
 
I thought Oblivion didnt utilize crossfire and sli that well? Not to say it doesnt get a boost but its very little.

Any 8800 or 38x0 should be able to run Oblivion fine. I was rather obsessed with it at one time and put a lot of effort into getting some awesome 2560x1600 Oblivion goodness going. With max settings, default textures, and mod'd ini, I was able to average around 40FPS outdoors with an AM2 CPU @2.5 and 8800GTS 640MB.

I upgraded to an 8800GTX later on, I easily maintained 50-60FPS outdoors. When I was part way through the second time, on the GTX, I decided to max out the drivers (8xAA/16xAF/MS/ect.) and pulled in an average of 20-30FPS. I found it very playable at that frame rate and only realy had issues with the burning city and its rain effects.

I was playing at 2560x1600 so you should definatly be set with a 8800 or 38x0 at a lower resolution. With the bigger texture mods you do need more Video RAM so it maybe a situation where something like a 8800GT 1GB may come in handy. If you do go the dual GPU route, please realize that the 1GB on the 3870x2 or 9800GX2 is actualy 512MB per GPU. This isnt going to help you much in trying to do the larger res textures, the main reason I never did them is because I didnt think 768MB was enough at 2560x1600 with AA.

For the best Oblivion experience I recommend making sure you have a fast hard drive. I did this a noticed a massive difference in playability. I then bought a second and RAID'd them which made an insanly smooth experience. In all honesty, I felt the hard drive change made a bigger difference then the GPU swap.

As your RAM, and VRAM, fill up Oblivion begins caching the textures to the hard disk. This is what causes the constant loading and stutters. By beefing up the ram, to stop the caching, and speeding up the disk, just incase of caching, it supplies a much smoother experince and stops most of the spike in FPS. Once I went RAID, I never saw a loading screen, never had a stutter, and my FPS only changed by about 5FPS here and there. Id also suggest tweaking the memory settings and page file features of windows as it makes a tremendous difference as well.
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The graph you linked to isnt very accurate. Ive played through Oblivion on a 7900GS, 7900GT, 7950GX2, 8800GTS 640MB, and 8800GTX numerous times. I was able to play maxed out with a 7900GS at 1680x1050 with either 2AA or 4AA(dont recall) and got better then what they claim a 8800GTX gets. By maxed settings I mean every slider maxed and all in game settings set to max detail (except I leave grass shadow off). With Oblivion, its all about how you set-up the ini and I dont think the person that did that graph had it configured properly.
 
You should be able to run both Better Tiling Lanscape LOD and QTP3 on any 512mb card as long as your resolution is reasonable. You might have to use 2048x2048 for the BT one if it gets choppy when using 4096x4096 for both mods. I would expect a 8800GT or higher to do quite well with oblivion.
 
Well, the computer that I first ran it on was 2 7800gtx's in SLI...but sadly those were bought before the 512mb versions were released. The game ran decently, considering the sheer amount of texture memory I was shoving down its throat. There's a chance I might end up with a GX2, as sexy as it is, but the price is a little prohibitive. I'm going to be playing the game at 1680x1050.

That's interesting about the hard drive speed. The computer mentioned above ran a 74GB Raptor. This future build is most likely going to have the new WD 640gb drive, with the 320gb platters and is fairly fast. RAID0 is a tempting mistress however...
 
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