Upgrading video card...

[ZBVBV_666]

Hello there, fellow Cyrodiilians. This humble soldier makes his first post here - it's 7 o'clock in the afternoon watch and all's well.

 

 

I'm having a question here that I want to get some answers to...

 

I've building my PC's for the last 5 years now, and acquired respectable knowledge in the domain. Right now I am running an AMD Phenom 2 940BE, an ASUS P5Q-Pro mobo, 4 gigs of Mushkin RAM @1066MHz, and one EVGA 9800GTX+ (From previous experiences on forums with certain arrogant wannabe "hardcore builders", I'd like to state in advance that my parents are not rich, do not own 3 cars and a mansion, and don't pump thosands of dollars into my wallet for my PC, so I politely excuse myself those those whose egos might be offended by my choices. This rig was build with the money I had 15 months ago). I have a pretty big arraay of about 200+ mods running for Oblivion, but some mods such as Bananasplit's Better Cities, givee my videocard a hard time keeping up. With BBC installed, I am consistently getting ~20FPS in EVERY major city, even with the FPS patches (which didn't seem to help at all). The same thing is happening now with Shadowcrest Vineyard manor - I'm getting under 30 FPS in the dining room, the desk on the balcony overseeing the first floor, and the house's yard. Even without BBC, I'm still getting under 30 FPS in some cities.

 

Here are my settings

 

Resolution - 1440x900

Textures - High

All object/NPC visibility set to about 9/10 on the scale

LOD enabled

Distant Land Features enabled

Full Shadows (Self, Tree Canopy, all the goodies) + Shadow Filtering High)

HDR on

Water High Quality (modded)

Water Details High

Blood High Quality (modded)

NO AA

 

I think it's partially because of the fact that my PC has sat unused for one year - I remember definitely getting better FPS last time I played Oblivion - and partially because I used my 9800GTX+ intensely in the past years. So I was thinking to re-format, might pop Windows 7 on my rig, and will try to replace my faithful 9800 with an EVGA GTX260 Core216 or a EVGA GTX280. I've researched into the performance of both videocards, and they perform substantially better than my 9800GTX+.

 

As of the moment, I can get an EVGA 260GTX Core216 for $160 or trade in a few goodies I don't use anymore for it. Do you think it's worth it? To whoever has any of these cards (GTX260 Core216 or GTX280, or better even, had both), could you give some advice? I would like whether it's worth to trade in the parts for a GTX260 Core216, or to buy a GTX280. And if anyone has BBC, Qarl's Texture Pack 3 Redimized (3x original size textures) on a rig with any of those cards, please tell me what frames you're getting in and out of the cities, please. Even if you have QTP full, it still helps, because it means I'll probably get a bit higher due to lower texture sizes.

Thank you in advance,

Daniel

[yeldarb]

More RAM is always a (fairly) cheap upgrade. Have you tried using a program like Streamline? This utility is available on TESNexus and can help older computers run Oblivion better.Oblivion is not a drain on a graphics card as much as it is a memory and processor hog.

[ZBVBV_666]

Have you tried using a program like Streamline?

 

Just installed it. It does a good job of keeping my FPS nice and smooth, but sometimes I still get under 30 FPS.

 

Now I think I have a new problem, which I didn't have before... In caves and during nights, the luminosity randomly drops. Therefore I end up with either very dark caves, or very dark nights, which is very annoying. As said, did not have this problem before, it's something that came with Streamline. Worse of all, it's twitchy, too, so I get random flashes of "normal" light while I'm blindly groping for my way around. It's something to do with brightness, because even fires dim down. If you've had anything similar, please tell me.

 

Thanks.