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.

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.

Running Oblivion at 1600x1200 in Ultra Quality mode is asking a lot, but you can almost get away with it on the 7900 GS. I wouldn't want to use these settings for everything, but the game does feel fairly smooth most of the time.

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 those cards were all running at the game's "Medium" texture quality.

The 7900 GS gives up a step or two to the 7900 GT in GRAW's average frame rates, but the median low frame rates in GRAW are practically identical between GS and GT. In other words, you'd probably never notice the difference between the two by the seat of your pants.