I recently upgraded my video card from an NVidia 9500 GT to a Radeon 6570. The guy at the computer store did a comparison - the Radeon is 2-3x more powerful in all categories; it has 1MB of VRAM and DDR 5, so it should, as he said "stomp your old card into the dirt". And it does, kind of - the new graphics are freaking gorgeous.

The problem is, my FPS is half what it used to be - I was getting 15-20 outdoors before, and now I'm lucky if I can break 10-12; most of the time, I've got single-digit FPS. I'm using most of the same settings as before: screen size, no HDR/Bloom, ini settings, etc.; I set AA to x4 (I let the card take charge of that) and anisotropic filtering to x8; playing around with AA, AF, and Vsync has absolutely no effect, BTW - that was the first thing I checked. I've got the latest drivers, too... so what's going on? This card should be making Oblivion its [censored], but it looks like it's the other way around.

AMD's Radeon 570 cards are "budget level" game cards, not Mainline level. The Geforce 9500 GT was a renamed Geforce 8600 GT, which may not have been the kind of gangbusters fast card that an 8800 was, but it held its own with the HD 2600 Pro and the HD 3650. It took the HD 4670 to blow it away. The 570s seem to be much more like the 4670's little brother, the HD 4650, and therefore, more or less of a sideways step from an 8600 GT.

Your card isn't intended to perform at a Medium quality level like an HD 6670, or run screen resolutions at high settings. It's only a budget card, sitting in the gray area where it's not really a Medium power graphics card, but neither is it a Low End business graphics card.