That doesn't bode well for other processors, as there simply isn't much more we can throw at the game. What we will investigate in future articles is exactly what is causing this limitation we would assume we're CPU limitated even though we're already running an Athlon 64 FX-60. We see no benefit to SLI or CrossFire here, due to whatever limitation we're running into at these settings. If we crank up any of the detail settings we'll be looking at even worse minimum frame rates, which are just as important. It's also worth noting that although a lot of these cards have average frame rates in the 50s, their minimums all drop to right around 30 fps. The problem with these numbers is that you really can't determine what settings you'll be running Oblivion at based on your in-town or in-dungeon performance, because the moment you step outside you'll find yourself watching a slide show. No, believe it or not, but the GeForce 6800 GS performs like a mid-range card at best under Oblivion.ДЄt our high quality 1280 x 1024 setting, virtually all of the cards offer nearly identical performance when walking around inside a town, even down to the minimum frame rates. Even a pair of GeForce 6800 GSes can't break 15 fps in this test and with a minimum frame rate of 10 fps, they make the game far from playable at these settings. GeForce 6 owners should no longer consider their GPUs as high end, because Oblivion certainly doesn't. Given that we haven't turned up every feature and are running at a relatively mainstream 1280 x 1024 resolution, this chart alone gives you good indication of exactly how stressful Oblivion actually is. Unable to average more than 20 fps in this test, the settings we're running at here are too much for the GPU. What really puts things into perspective though is the performance of the GeForce 7800 GTX, a GPU that was at one point a $500 king of the hill now falls in the lower half of the graph. Looking at single card performance, once again ATI takes the crown as the Radeon X1900 XTX has higher average and minimum frame rates than the GeForce 7900 GTX. We tried adjusting the render ahead setting but couldn't improve the situation any for NVIDIA, so while both ATI and NVIDIA's best performers offer similar average frame rates, the ATI Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire setup is better overall thanks to higher minimum frame rates.

It doesn't actually matter which vendor you go with, both ATI and NVIDIA offer similar performance at the very high end with one very important exception: ATI seems to offer much higher minimum frame rates than NVIDIA at the very high end in this test. The white lines within the bars indicate minimum frame rateДЄt the very high end, in our most strenuous benchmark, $1200 of graphics cards will buy you less than 50 fps on average.

Oblivion low fps on high end pc