Well dang.

Just finally got round to upgrading my ageing Nvidia 7600GS to a shiny new ATi HD6870, so I can finish off Oblivion (currently playing through Shivering Isles) at nice pretty settings, try out a few mods, then get round to buying Skyrim.

Loaded my save in a dungeon in Shivering Isles. All looking good, running very well indeed, finish the dungeon, hit the exit door - outdoors loads, music and ambience starts to play ... black screen. Oblivion has crashes. And it crashes pretty hard too - takes a fair bit of hammering of C+A+D and some waiting before my computer becomes responsive again.

I also, and I guess this is important, get and error message saying something along the lines of "The ATi display driver stopped working but it recovered", which vanishes by the time I've wrestled control back of my machine.

Tried loading some previous saves - ones indoors work fine, ones outdoors crash.

Tried disabling all mods. Still crashes on outdoors.

Tried dropping settings to min from the external Oblivion options. Still crashes on outdoors.

Tried deleting preference files so oblivion boots in basic settings. Still crashes on outdoors.

Trying running as admin under XP compatability mode. Still crashes on outdoors.

Can anyone help?

Here's my spec:
Athlon 64 X2 4200 | 2GB RAM | 650W PSU (and a decent one that actually does 650W!) | Windows 7 32bit | XFX RadeonHD 6870

Now this is interesting.

It's not actually 'crashing' per se. If I leave it running it sits there playing the music and ambience, and eventually the HUD pops up. If I leave it longer, I might get a frozen shot of the outside world. The screen will flicker black occasionally and then I'm back to a black screen with the hud visible. Can't bring up options or anything - it seems like the game has dropped to about one frame a minute, although I usually cant see the world.

Also, when I exit the program I notice I have several little orange circles in my taskbar with what look like 'AC3' and something else in it. I did the ffdshow trick as advised in the FAQ but this doesn't seem to have made any difference.

What did you do with the INI file?

Deleted it, so it creates a new default one.

When swapping out GPUs, did you first do a complete uninstall of your Nvidia drivers via Control Panel? Did you perchance run a utility like Driver Sweeper to insure no Nvidia GPU files and settings remained. (And of course be careful to NOT remove Nvidia mobo chipset drivers and the like if you have an Nvidia-based motherboard.) Did you attach the auxiliary power leads (if required) to your GPU?

-Decrepit-

I neglected in uninstall the nvidia stuff before putting in the ATi card - had kind of forgotten the new card and the old one were different makes! Uninstalled the nvidia stuff before installing the ATi software, made sure any references to nVidia removed.

Did notice that one of the additional power cables for the cards didn't appear to be quite seated properly. Shut down, pushed it in properly, booted up again.

Same problem persists.

Just installed Steam and that also crashes on load, but not with the same error.

Any soak tests I can try to establish if it is the gfx card itself?

Which .ini did you delete?

Not oblivion_default.ini I hope.

The one to delete is the oblivion.ini file (...\My Documents\My Games\Oblivion\Oblivion.ini)

And did you try deleting the .ini file again after the driver sweep??? (the one Qwax is referring to, not the default one)

Yes.