I have a ATI Radeon 4850 x2 but the graphics options say I have a Nvidia 7900 GS. This PC was just freshly loaded with Win 7 today and I haven never even owned an Nvidia card.

Obsidian seems to have done something wrong with regard to the hardware detection procedures that the game engine included for Oblivion and for Fallout 3. What it amounts to isn't certain, and it seems to affect several dozen times as many Gefrorce owners as Radeon owners. Both kinds of graphics cards are competitive with one another if you understand the naming and price points they meet at. Neither is inherently better or worse.

nVIDIA, however, has embarked on a path to a different future than AMD is free to pursue, and I think their processor's architechtural design is harder about its interactions with drivers and with Direct3D than is the case for AMD right now. They seem to be slipping and sliding all over the place with driver software that constantly gives Geforce card owners difficulties.

Not that AMD hasn't also been guilty of some bad driver releases, themselves. I have seen a couple of different vectors for the misidentification symptom to appear; one of those is a specific fix for recently produced Geforces that bog down very badly whenever several NPCs are in view at the same time. As best I understand these problems, only the Geforces "need" a copy of d3d9.dll copied into the game folder.

If the game works for you in spite of the misidentification, you are out ahead of many Geforce card owners. Tell us how the game actually works, OK?

Sounds like you used the "dll fix" to me. If so, it's doing what it's supposed to, no need to worry. Mine say it to and I have 2 5870s.

I did use the .dll fix, but I had been playing before I did a fresh OS install both with and without the .dll fix and it never said I had the wrong card.

It's expected with the DLL fix, everyone get's the same thing.

It doesn't matter that it reports the wrong card, it doesn't impact the game in any way.

I just got around to trying it again. I'm not sure if this is because of that new patch or what but when I originally got the .dll I had 50-60 FPS on Ultra. Now I have 30 if I'm lucky, that's what I was getting before I added the .dll.

Because you have a Radeon, you aren't "supposed" to need the d3d9.dll copy in the game folder anyway.

Really? Well it helped after I put it in. I guess I will try it without and see what happens then.