Upgrage from X1800XT for £200

[Darkwave]

Been playing Oblivion for an hour or so and tweaking some settings. Outdoors is fine most of the time, it's when you're using a light spell in dungeons that the framerate drops below what I'd consider 'smooth'. I'm using 1280*800 btw which is 16:10 ratio, same as the screen. None of the settings really help for indoor framerates though (tried shadows and specular distance) so I didn't really achieve much. It must be doing an extra texture pass or something when you're using light spells.

For under £200 I could replace my A64 with an X2 of some sort, and I believe Oblivion benefits from dual-core. Dunno if that's gonna be worth it though. If the game is fill rate limited, or pixel shader performance limited, in dungeons then it probably wouldn't help much.

Oblivion does benefit from dual core, but not a lot to be honest. If it wasn't such a hugely expensive upgrade (compared to the budget we're talking about I mean) I would recommend going Core 2 Duo, but I also don't know how you feel about Intel vs. sticking with AMD.

 

[achitophel]

Just as a general comment, all the benchies I've seen show the high end DX9 ATI cards ahead (in terms of £ for £) of the Nvidia versions, so if the upgrade is specifically Nvidia focussed, then I'd bear that in mind.

Also worth a look at tweaking all of the specific video options - a useful tweak guide which I found but haven't been through yet is:-

http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_1.html

Good luck anyway

 

[fish99]

Cheers lads

Think I've got the performance I was after, by overclocking my 4000+ SD to 2.88 (from 2.4). I'd been running at stock after Oblivion had started hanging a few weeks ago, but that turned out to be down to a mod not the cpu. Seems to have given that extra bit of fps to keep it looking smooth. Kinda surprised it made such a difference.

 

[Darkwave]

Ah yes, as if I forgot to suggest that. I noticed a nice difference taking my Newcastle from 3400+ to 3900+ speeds some time ago, especially in Oblivion.