TES: OblivionOfficial websiteThe Oblivion graphics engine can be very taxing for even the fastest hardware once you increase the level of detail. There is also a difference in performance compared running outside, in city area or inside a dungeon, the outside is most taxing for the graphics card, the town area is noticeably easier on the GPU while the dungeon is usually less taxing of all. We tested the heaviest environment with HDR enabled and in-game settings maxed out.
Any of the tested cards were able to produce quite high frame rate at the 1600x1200 resolution, with some of those cards priced under €200 I think you have quite a bargain in your hands, things were very different in the past. ATI's HD3870 falls behind the competition here, together with the older 8800GTS they were not able to keep minimum frame rate above 40FPS in some of the heavier 3D scenes in Oblivion. Throwing in the 9600 GT yields slightly higher frame rate, but it is only with the faster 8800 GT and XFX 8800GTS 320MB that the game was most enjoyable. In the end, Galaxy's overclocked 9600 GT could not really increase the performance over the standard 9600GT.
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The problem was that one of the standard overclocked cards became instable whenever being put through heavy 3D rendering tasks, downclocking it solved the problem so I guessed we got stuck up with a bugged card (remember the news regarding transient voltage fix on 9600GT's).
Now, nearly one week after launch date, there seems to be something sneaky going on with NV9600 series. NVIDIA has changed the ways clocks are being build up. Earlier, a 27MHz crystal was used, the clock frequency got multiplied and devided until you get the final clockspeed, 650MHz for example. With GeForce 9600GT the GPU core frequency is based on the PCIe speed, the downside here is that my system always is configured with a 110MHz PCIe clock, making the 9600GT used in our article extra overclocked by another 10%!
So... let me warn you here: the results obtained in our article are based on a system using 110MHz PCI-Express clock instead of 100MHz, this difference stands for a 10% overclock on the 9600GT core clock and will have its impact on total system performance.
This being said, we will fix our way of testing in upcoming articles. Those who are still puzzled, don't hesitate to ask around what I was trying to explain here above, but I insist you have a read at our source, thank you techPowerUp!