The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
We tested Oblivion by manually playing through a specific point in the game five times while recording frame rates using the FRAPS utility. Each gameplay sequence lasted 60 seconds. This method has the advantage of simulating real gameplay quite closely, but it comes at the expense of precise repeatability. We believe five sample sessions are sufficient to get reasonably consistent and trustworthy results. In addition to average frame rates, we've included the low frames rates, because those tend to reflect the user experience in performance-critical situations. In order to diminish the effect of outliers, we've reported the median of the five low frame rates we encountered.
The GeForce 7900 GTX and Radeon X1950 XTX are neck and neck here, while the Radeon X1900 XT 256MB continues to outperform the GeForce 7900 GT. I should mention, though, that there was a clear visual difference in this game between the 16X anisotropic texturing filtering modes offered by the two brands of cards. The Nvidia cards showed lots of high-frequency noise at certain mip levels and on mip-map boundaries, particularly in the cobblestone texture on the ground. The ATI cards did a much better job of presenting a sharp image without pixel shimmer, moire, or crawling. Frame rates also felt subjectively smoother on the ATI cards, especially during the first of our five runs through this sequence. 
It's a toss-up between the Radeon X1950 XTX and the GeForce 7900 GTX. In both single-card and multi-GPU configs, the 7900 GTX produces higher average frame rates, but the X1950 XTX achieves higher minimum frame rates. The X1900 XT 256MB, meanwhile, rolls on.
We tested Oblivion by manually playing through a specific point in the game five times while recording frame rates using the FRAPS utility. Each gameplay sequence lasted 60 seconds. This method has the advantage of simulating real gameplay quite closely, but it comes at the expense of precise repeatability. We believe five sample sessions are sufficient to get reasonably consistent and trustworthy results. In addition to average frame rates, we've included the low frames rates, because those tend to reflect the user experience in performance-critical situations. In order to diminish the effect of outliers, we've reported the median of the five low frame rates we encountered.
We set Oblivion's graphical quality settings to "Ultra High." The screen resolution was set to 1600x1200 resolution, with HDR lighting enabled. 16X anisotropic filtering was forced on via the cards' driver control panels.
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
We tested GRAW with FRAPS, as well. We cranked all of the quality settings for this game, with the exception of antialiasing. However, the game doesn't allow cards with 256MB of memory to run with its highest texture quality setting, so the GeForce 7900 GT and Radeon X1900 XT cards were both running at the game's "Medium" texture quality.
