I wouldn't recommend going with ATI just because of the black screen problems GF.....
Ditto.
There are two separate "black screen" problems. One (the older one) is caused by a shaderpackage issue, and is pretty much non-existent as of the 93.xx and newer drivers. The other version surfaced after the 1.2 patch and seems to manifest mostly when going through doors. This problem is fixable in several ways (different people have luck with different fixes):
1. Change iShadowMapResolution in the oblivion.ini file (in My Documents/My Games/Oblivion/) to 1024 or 2048. The 1.2 patch reduced it to 256, which apparently causes issues with certain Nvidia cards + drivers + chipset combinations.
2. Use certain newer 3rd party tweaked drivers (158.xx iirc) - I don't generally recommend this, since I'm a big proponent of "if Nvidia meant for you to use those drivers, they'd have released the drivers with an .inf file compatible with your GPU in the first place". Still, if you're up for it and willing to risk instability issues, give 'em a try (www.tweaksrus.com).
3. The third solution involves something with custom meshes and triangulation and nifskope. I don't know much about this though, having had no reason to dig into the issue.
Even all that aside, I'd still heartily recommend not going with an ATI if you're shopping for a new performance-level card. Especially since the black screen problems seem to be almost universally restricted to 7600-7900 cards. I've not heard any valid cases of any 8800 cards having this problem at all.
It's hard to believe how badly ATI screwed the pooch on the R600... pretty much sucks wind across the board (like, epic suckage... think of it as "sucking worse than Texas"). If they don't pull their heads out of their asses soon, it's going to be a one-video-card-manufacturer market.
Edited by Luchaire, 17 May 2007 - 06:55 PM.