Okay, so this might comm off ridiculous but I'm pretty sure I have all of the system requirements and I play Final Fantasy XI and I don't have any problems. However, I'm concerned my graphics card isn't applicable to the game. I installed it and everything ran smoothly, yet when I attempt opening the game it tells me that there has been an error and whether or not I would like to send an error report. I don't know what the problem is but mostly likely it has to do with my NVIDIA GeForce 3 Card. I don't know if any of you share this problem, but any support or help would be greatly appreciated.

-Veronica.

A Geforce3 card is your problem, you need a DirectX9 card to play Oblivion, the Geforce3 is DirectX8 (The very first DirectX8 chip in fact). You probably want a Geforce 6600GT or Radeon 9700 or better to play it. Oblivion also requires 128MB of graphics memory, and Geforce3s came with 64MB as I recall. Final Fantasy XI is a port of a Playstaion2 game, Oblivion an Xbox360 game, there is a gigantic technological gap between them.

quote obeseotron

A Geforce3 card is your problem, you need a DirectX9 card to play Oblivion, the Geforce3 is DirectX8 (The very first DirectX8 chip in fact). You probably want a Geforce 6600GT or Radeon 9700 or better to play it. Oblivion also requires 128MB of graphics memory, and Geforce3s came with 64MB as I recall. Final Fantasy XI is a port of a Playstaion2 game, Oblivion an Xbox360 game, there is a gigantic technological gap between them.

First thing you need to find out is what slots you have? If it's GeForce3 I'd expect that to be PCI but I don't really know about older cards. But eigher way, does your computer have an AGP slot or not? If not, time to get a new computer. The requirments for FFXI are substantially less then the requirements for Oblivion.

the latest from Nvidia is the Geforce 7800 I believe...you can get it either AGP or PCI-e...personally I would invest in a PCI-e motherboard and grab either Geforce 6600 series, 6800 series or 7800 series

Geforce3 cards were definitely AGP, there may have been PCI models built as specialty upgrade parts, but the VAST majority were AGP. ATI and nVidia's newest stuff is NOT available on AGP any more. The Geforce 7800GS is the fastest AGP card in existence, but is a good bit slower than the 7800gt or 7800gtx.

Newegg AGP 6600GT Cards

You are looking at around $140. Keep in mind this is a card I am suggesting just to run Oblivion, not run it with everything turned up to high and super smooth framerates. Oblivion will benefit from whatever better you can give it. Finally, if the rest of your computer is the same vintage as the Geforce3, you are going to have more problems. Make sure you have a gig of RAM, and a cpu in the mid 2ghz range (use the model number, not the clock rate if it's an AMD chip) or you may end up wasting your money.