The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Author: bit-tech Staff
Published: 31st March 2006
Comments (66) Stumble
We tested the performance of Oblivion across a number of video cards using a very stressful portion of the game, with lots of foilage, texture swapping and lots of opportunity to show of High Dynamic Range rendering. At the highest settings, the game looks absolutely stunning but that doesn't come without its drawbacks - this game is one hell of a stress on your system.

To give you an idea of how intensive this game is, we did most of our initial testing on a pair of BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC's running in SLI mode on the ABIT AN8 32X motherboard, along with 2GB of Corsair memory and an AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 processor. We were surprised to see one of the fastest configurations available fall to its knees at 1920x1200 with maximum details. It barely reached an average frame rate above 30 frames per second through the rolling hills in the first level.

High End System Setup:

AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 (operating at 2600MHz, 13x200MHz), ABIT AN8 32X (NVIDIA nForce4 SLI X16); 2 x 1GB Corsair XMS4000 Pro (operating in dual channel at 400MHz with 2.0-3-3-7-1T timings); Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 200GB 7,200RPM SATA II hard disk drive; OCZ PowerStream 600W power supply unit; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA nForce4 SLI X16 platform drivers, version 6.82.

Video Cards:
  • BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC 512MB - operating at its default clock speeds of 670/1640MHz using Forceware 84.25, available from nZone;
  • Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX 512MB - operating at its default clock speeds of 650/1550MHz using Catalyst 6.3 WHQL;
  • BFG Tech GeForce 7800 GT OC 256MB - operating at its default clock speeds of 425/1050MHz using Forceware 84.25, available from nZone.
We manually tweaked the in-game graphics settings via the video options screen, but there is no anisotropic filtering setting in there, meaning that it had to be controlled via the driver control panel. There is quite a lot of tweaking required to get the game to be remotely playable on anything that's not a flagship part. Even then, there is still a certain degree of tweaking required on high end cards.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion High-End Performance
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion High-End Performance
The Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX 512MB was the fastest of the three high-end cards we tested. It was able to play the game reasonably smoothly at 1280x1024 at Maximum Detail, including HDR lighting, with 16xHQ AF applied to the scene. The gaming experience was pretty awesome and immersive, especially when you consider how stressful this game is. There were still the texture popping issues, but those are present on any video card unless you manually tweak the configuration files to remove the problem.

The BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC wasn't quite as fast as the Radeon X1900XTX, as we were unable to run the game at its maximum settings. We were able to use almost maximum settings and high quality drivers too, as there were some areas where texture filtering could have been a little better - this was removed when optimisations were removed.

The main difference was that the card didn't seem to want to achieve reasonably smooth gameplay when Grass Shadows were enabled. After disabling the grass shadowing, the frame rate improved enough to make the game feel reasonably smooth - the minimum frame rate improved from around 12 fps up to 17 fps. The difference between the image quality on the Radeon X1900XTX and GeForce 7900 GTX wasn't noticeable, even with Grass Shadows turned off - all that seemed to do was darken the grass texture a little.

Finally, the BFG Tech GeForce 7800 GT OC performed surprisingly badly, when you consider that the card was NVIDIA's second fastest video card less than six months ago. We were only able to play the game at 1024x768 at medium-to-high detail settings with HDR and 8xAF enabled. We had to turn off Self Shadows, Grass Shadows and also turn the Soft Shadows (known as Shadow Filtering) down a little. The draw distance had to be lowered a little too, meaning that there was an evident fogging out of distant objects, too.

Don't get me wrong, it's great to see a game really stress hardware, but this is insane. We thought that F.E.A.R. was a stressful game, but this just tears it to shreds. Hopefully both ATI and NVIDIA will spend time improving performance with optimisations that don't result in a reduction of image quality. If there was ever a reason to spend lots of money on an expensive video card sub-system (or even Quad SLI, dare I say it), this game is currently it.

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