This is odd. I just got the Shivering Isles so I could play through that before my new graphics card and Skyrim arrive.

Haven't had Oblivion installed on this machine since I went Windows 7.

Here's the thing - no matter what settings I choose - no matter how low or how high the resolution, whatever visual settings I choose, Oblivion runs at a rather unpleasant 20FPS or so.

I can run it at 720 x 480 or 1280 x 800 and it still runs at around 20fps. I can turn textures down to low, or up to high, and move the sliders all the way left or all the way right, and it still runs around 20fps.

Any idea why this is happening? My machine is pretty low spec by todays standards, but pretty good by 2006 standards! Anything I can do to improve this?

My spec is: Athlon 62 X2 4200, 2GB RAM, NVidia 7600GS graphics card, Windows 7 32bit.

normally i would say your CPU is bottlenecking your graphics card.. but uh..to be honest with that rig i wouldnt expect much more. if youve gone and got a new graphics card you'll likely find that either your CPU will bottleneck it or your PSU wont cope with it if its like <500w. by bottleneck i mean its irrelevent how powerful graphics card you get if your CPU cant feed data to it quick enough.
dont trust sites like this for pc info. go register with guru3d.com and check things through with them in future.

Wrong. The AMD X2 4200 was just fine in 2006, and 2008, even. It's the "GS" model of the 7600 that never was much good, all the way back to its release, compared to the real, PRACTICAL minimums for Oblivion.

Thanks - the 7600GS was indeed never a great performer - I purchased it due to it's silent running rather than quality gaming performance.

It should, however be more than capable of running Oblivion.

If I can run it at 1280 x 800 with everything maxed out, and get 20fps - surely running it at 720 x 480 with everything at minimum I should be getting a great deal more than 20fps? Thing is - I'm not. It doesn't make sense.