New Rig... poor results

I was fortunate on getting a new computer a few days ago but have been wondering about something.

First here are the specs:

--Windows Vista Home Premium
--Intel Quad-Core 2.4ghz
--Nvidia GeForce 8500 GT (256 dedicated memory and ~750 shared)(With latest drivers)
--2 gigs of ram.

My first question is this: I installed Oblivion and was expecting to have some incredible visual quality like I did on my old laptop which only had an (1)Nvidia Geforce Go 7600 (2)Intel Dual-core 1.6ghz (3)1 gig of ram (4) and Xp Professional. Despite the better specs on my new PC, Oblivion however ran WORSE on the same settings as my laptop did!

Anyone know why this happens? My first thoughts were that of Vista was hoggin a lot of resources...

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Nvidia GeForce 8500 GT (256 dedicated memory and ~750 shared)(With latest drivers)

What is the date of the drivers?

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Yarlen

Join Date 01/2005

+366

Currently Vista is still much slower than XP with games, so that could be part of it. Also, the Nvidia drivers for Vista are still not in good gaming form, so you're going to lose a lot there as well.

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Nvidia GeForce 8500 GT

From what I've heard the performance on nVidia's mid-low 8000 cards is rather poor indeed across the board. Seeing it bested by a higher 7000-series card doesn't come as much surprise at all in light of that. Aside from cheap DX10 support, there's really little reason to get one (especially as it probably lacks the muscle to actually make reasonable use of its DX10 features).

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Zydor

Join Date 03/2006

+38

Raw performance stats are always suspect in terms of conclusions of course, but they are usful for comparitors. Toms Hardware did a Review on principly 8600GT, but they covered peripheral aspects surrounding it with the other NVIDIA cards.

There is a quantum leap in specification and performance between the 8300 to 8500's and the 8600 to 8800s.
Comparitor table

This next one is a dreaded benchmark table, but again useful for comparitive purposes. The 8600 GT is bottom not surprisingly when seen against the cards the table shows, and bare in mind the 8500 is significantly less powerful and was not built for high end gaming. If you then look at the high end 7900 card - 7900GTX - and its position, then reflect on the likely result of an 8500GT entry on the table, its highly likely it is less powerful than your old laptop card. Regretably not many people did reviews on 8500's so its hard to find hard core facts

8600 GT Benchmark Table

Factor in the Vista and Driver issues mentioned above, and that will probably nail it down as to why.

Regards
Zy

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