Here is the news directly from nVidia to us:
So the take home message is this.... 1) a new driver is coming out for Oblivion and it's 84.25. 2) Benchmarking on this game will be a major pain in the ass since the scores will never be the same thanks to random vegatation.No doubt you have heard that Oblivion (Elder Scrolls IV) from Bethesda Softworks is finally being released very soon after being in development since 2002.
Our developer relations team worked closely with Bethesda to optimize game performance, which also included making some driver changes to fix/enhance performance in certain areas.
We will soon be releasing a new driver (version 84.25) that is scheduled to be posted to nZone.com on Wednesday March 22, 2006.
If you test Oblivion with NVIDIA graphics boards, please use the new
84.25 driver in order to measure performance representative of what end users will experience with the updated driver.
Our performance testing shows no two benchmark runs are identical in exterior scenes, due to Oblivion randomly placing grass and rocks, changing the amount of grass, and varying other aspects of the terrain.