The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Author: bit-tech Staff
Published: 31st March 2006
Comments (69) Stumble

Settings

Elder Scrolls includes a shedload of options for configuring your display - four full screens high! You can tweak each one to try and get the maximum detail for your required framerate.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Graphics details The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Graphics details The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Graphics details The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Graphics details
Straight from the off, you'll spot a couple of things. The first, and possibly biggest issue, is that you cannot run HDR and Anti-Aliasing together, regardless of your hardware. No NVIDIA card, no ATI card on the market will do AA+HDR in this game. Which you pick, therefore, will depend on whether you can handle the frame rate impact of HDR or whether or not your card is man enough to handle a high resolution. We believe that it's better to have HDR in this game rather than AA, even at relatively low resolutions.

View distance is one of the settings that has the biggest effect on frame rate, with landscapes stretching to the horizon absolutely owning even high end machines.

Over the following pages, all the screenshots enlarge to 1600x1200 versions.

Detail levels

To see the detail scaling across different levels of hardware, we took some screenshots at various detail levels to show the kind of graphical quality you can get.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Graphics details The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Graphics details The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Graphics detailsLeft to right: High, Medium and Low Detail, as configured in the Settings screen.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Graphics details The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Graphics details The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Graphics detailsLeft to right: High, Medium and Low Detail, as configured in the Settings screen.
We manually scaled back the sliders to show the graphics quality, since there are no 'preset' modes for detail. In the High Detail screenshot, you can see the maximum amount of foliage and view distance, as well as very High Quality textures. In the Low Quality screenshot, you can see the distance scaled right back and the quality of the textures far worse, reducing the gameplay experience to a rather pathetic level.

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