| Current mood: |  I AM ERROR. |
It burrrrns
So apparently playing Oblivion for more than about half an hour makes my video card hotter than (insert furry reference here,) which I suppose would explain the whole "it runs fine at first but eventually things start getting glitchy" effect I was experiencing.
But come on, it's Oblivion. This is not a new game. Mercury (not shown: GeForce 7900 GT card) may or may not (probably not) be able to handle Crysis, but my last machine could freaking handle Oblivion. Granted, I might have added a couple texture-replacing mods since then, but I'm told that if those prove too much to handle, that's allegedly supposed to manifest itself immediately as stuttering/choppy performance and low framerate, not later as things-are-great-until-your-video-card-explodes.
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yiffyraptor has already suggested compressed air-blasting the card just in case dust buildup is doing it, which doesn't seem like a bad idea, though I'll have to get more compressed air for that since apparently we're out and no one told me. Other than that, I'm open to advice from my more tech-savvy friends.
In case this helps, checking the temperature first thing upon logging in after the computer has been off for a while gave me a reading of about 45 C, but it was up to about 50 C (the threshold upon which Hardware Sensors Monitor 4.4 starts coloring the readout window yellow) within 5-10 minutes of random desktop/Firefox (no games) use. It's been on for hours as of when I write this but at absolutely no point was Oblivion (or any game) played, and the increase is either dramatically slower or has finally stabilized, but has done so at around 60 C (still yellow.) I'm no expert, but that seems high for idle non-game use (and I can recognize that yellow isn't a good color to be seeing on a white-yellow-red temperature scale,) which, when combined with what I said about how one would expect cranked-too-high settings/shiny new textures/etc. to cause immediate framerate issues rather than slow and gradual temperature issues, leads me to believe that I'm looking at some other problem. Dust seems like as good a guess as any for now, but again, input is welcome.
