Interesting results testing 2 cards in Oblivion

[HorseArcher]

Well, I had a problem yesterday with my PC. Basically my 6800GS refused to start my PC. All I had, was all the lights coming on on my PC; the sound of the HD and the CD spinning up, and the HD light staying on.

The bios never loaded, neither the "beep" heard, and the monitor stayed in the power-save state.

So anyway, I figured, my card might have given up, so this is what I did:

- I put back my ATI 9800Pro 128mb.

- Removed my nvidia driver and replaced it by the ATI driver.

So I load up Oblivion to see how much this game pwns this graphic card, but i got some suprising results.

Appearantly, the game ran very smoothly after fiddling with some options.

Basically, I moved all the options to the same settings that I have been using with the 6800GS.

Having no HDR option, I settled with the "bloom" settings and have all graphic sliders in the middle, except the int/ext shadows, which had to be pulled back to 1/5.

I put on the 'tdt' to display my frame rate and for my suprise it was the same (20fps outside, and up to 50fps inside) just like with my Nvidia card. I even managed to bump up the grass visibility and turn the water to "high" with all the bells and whistles.

The grass really suprised me, because it was pretty much knocking out my GS card, and yet with the 9800Pro card it had no major impact on my frame rate - maybe 3-4fps difference having it all the way on or not having it on at all.

Of course, the game did not look the same, due to the shader version the 9800Pro uses + other particle effect/graphics effect (whatever those are) that it just can't manage to do like the 6800GS.

I managed to play the game for over 3-4hrs , until i got bored again and I figured, I give my 6800GS another shot, (see if it's really dead or just faking).

So reversed the whole process, and for about the 10th time of restarting/turning off the PC, it finally booted into Windows.

I loaded the game again, kept all the sliders on the same like the ATI and for suprise - I only noticed just a bit more (4-5fps) difference compared to the ATI's preformance. Of course, I also had all the other little graphic effects to show up with my GS card that were unavailable with the ATI card.

Coming from this little test, I am trying to figure out what is exactly causing this "similarity" between 2 cards, that are far from each other in performance:

Here are my hypotetical questions and answers that I came up with :


- "ATI makes better cards, Nvidia sucks."
No. Both companies make excellent cards and choosing between the 2 is the question of price/performance. I have both cards and I like them both equally, the name doesn't bother me as long as I can play games with them.

- My card is defective, I should have a better performance with the GS.
It is possible that it has a defect of not booting up all the time, but once it is running, it works like a charm, with no side effects or anything. I also have other games that require a good card (FEAR, COD2, etc) and they run perfectly smooth with my card.
Also, I checked the official forums and other places for Oblivion's performance on my card and similar specs as mine and i'm getting the same performance
just like majority.

-My drivers are no good.
My drivers are good. I tested 4 versions of Nvidia drivers, even non-official ones and they don't do any difference in Oblivion.


-Oblivion has problems with the incorporated graphical enhancements made for the latest cards.
The most possible and probably the best answer, based on my tests. Coming from the single thought, that my 9800Pro is unable to display many of the new things in Oblivion (refraction shader, 3.0 shader usage, etc), the card has no problem running the game without them and they are disabled from the start, when the game detects the hardware.

Also something interesting: During combat, the 9800Pro had no problem beside the usual 2-3fps framedrop while fighting an enemy. On the other hand with my 6800GS, I experience some major performance drop, even if i just fight one enemy. Going from a steady 20-23fps, my frame rate can dip down to 10-14fps, until the enemy dies.
I'm not sure what effects are "extra" while using the 6800GS, but definetely it is knocking my card to "oblivion". Also to be noted, HDR on the 6800GS does not make a difference on my performance. I can have HDR on or off, I did not notice any difference in speed.

So, what do you guys think? Maybe this clears up some confusion of why Oblivion is such a performance monster on some's computer, and why others with lesser cards say that they got "no problem" running Oblivion?

Anyway, here are my specs:

160GB Maxtor-HD
80GB WD -HD (used for backup files)
AMD 64 -3000+ (non FX)
XFX Nvidia Geforce 6800GS-256MB AGP
or
ATI Radeon 9800Pro - 128MB (forgot what company made it)
500W Antec power supply
tried the lastest drivers for both cards.



I'm gonna post the official specs for both cards, note how the 6800GS should completely rule over the 9800pro:

RADEON 9800 PRO specifications:

1. Fab process: 0.15 micron;
2. Transistors: 115 M;
3. Core clock speed: 380 MHz;
4. Memory bus: 256 bit DDR (DDR II will possibly be supported later);
5. Local memory size: up to 256 MB;
6. Memory clock speed: 340 DDR (680) MHz, 24 GB/s bandwidth;
7. Interface bus: AGP 8x, 2 GB/s bandwidth;
8. Full support of DX9's main features:
1. Floating-point 64 and 128 bit data formats for textures (including 3D and cubic textures) and frame buffer (vectors of 4 components of F16 or F32);
2. Pixel pipelines with floating-point arithmetics (F24[4] or F24[3+1] calculations);
3. Pixel Shaders 2.0;
4. 4 independent vertex pipelines;
5. Vertex Shaders 2.0;
6. N-Patches hardware tessellation with Displacement Mapping, and, if possible, adaptive detail level;
7. New F-buffer technology supports almost unlimited pixel shaders.

9. 8 independent pixel pipelines
10. 8 texture units (one for pixel pipeline) supporting trilinear filtering without speed loss and a combination of anisotropic and trilinear filtering.
11. 4-channel (4 64-bit channels) memory controller connected to the accelerator's core and AGP switch on the peer-to-peer basis;
12. HyperZ III+ memory optimization technology (Fast Z Clear and 8x8 depth buffer compression, Hierarchical Z Buffer for fast visibility checking);
13. Additional optimizations for speedy operation of the double-side stencil buffer.
14. Early Z test (pixel shaders work only for visible pixels);
15. Hardware acceleration of MPEG 1/2 unpacking and compression, VIDEOSHADER technology (arbitrary processing of a video flow with pixel shaders);
16. Two independent CRTC;
17. Two built-in 10bit 400 MHz RAMDAC with hardware gamma correction;
18. Integrated TV-Out;
19. Integrated DVI (TDMS transmitter) interface, up to 2043*1536.
20. Integrated general-purpose digital interface for external RAMDAC or DVI transmitter and for coupling with TV tuner.
21. FC packaging (FlipChip).


NVIDIA 6800 GS

Memory 128/256MB gDDR3
Silicon Process 110nm
Transistor Count (millions) 202
Core Speed MHz 425
Memory Speed MHz 500 (x2=1000mhz)
Bus Standard PEG 16x
Bus Width 256bit
Pipeline Configuration Textures/Pixels/Z Samples (Per Clock) 12/12/24
Vertex Units 5
Peak Memory Bandwidth (GB/s) 32.0
Pixel Fillrate (million pixels/sec) 5,100
Texel Fillrate (million texels/sec) 5,100
API Compliancy DX 9.0c Shader Model 3.0

[fallingstar]

My Sapphire Radeon ATI 9800 256 mb works fine on medium settings, only on small occassions does it slow a bit only for 5 seconds. Recently installed the Radeon ATI X1600, decided not to get the Nvidia 6800 one, because its too expensive and two members in here said it slows the game when near an oblivion gate. Difference I am playing on high settings and saw a difference on the water bit as well as some lights up for detection spell, which brightens too much.

[HorseArcher]

My Sapphire Radeon ATI 9800 256 mb works fine on medium settings, only on small occassions does it slow a bit only for 5 seconds. Recently installed the Radeon ATI X1600, decided not to get the Nvidia 6800 one, because its too expensive and two members in here said it slows the game when near an oblivion gate. Difference I am playing on high settings and saw a difference on the water bit as well as some lights up for detection spell, which brightens too much.

YOu are correct. The only reason I'm closing off oblivion gates is not because I like doing it, but to speed up the framerate of my game. Oblivion gates drag my FPS into the 10-s, regardless if they are already visible or not.

[Incinerate_IV]

I also heard some people say Oblivion runs nicely on their 9800Pro, thats pretty amazing for a 3rd generation card.

Just to let you know the AGP 6800GS is slower than the PCI-E ones, I think the core is only running at 380 mhz or something around that. And did you use Driver Cleaner/Cab Cleaner when uninstalling drivers to switch cards?

[Drunken]

I run it on a ATI 9800 pro (128mb), the rest of my PC isnt really up to the job so oblivion runs quite poorly, and due to that I have had to make lots of changed to the .ini and fiddled with it loads to make it work. It stutters a fair bit still, but its playable and doesnt crash often :original: )

Ive seen lots of different tests done using different cards and it is surprising sometimes how well older ones can perform. Lots of the time its due to the game being more CPU intensive, but not in oblivions case, where the game trys its best to disintergrate all hardware.