The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

We used the latest addition to the impressive Elder Scrolls series of titles, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion with the 1.2 patch applied. It uses the Gamebyro engine and features DirectX 9.0 shaders, the Havok physics engine and Bethesda use SpeedTree for rendering the trees.

The world is made up of trees, stunning landscapes, lush grass and features High Dynamic Range (HDR) lighting and soft shadowing. If you want to learn more about The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, we recommend giving our graphics and gameplay review a read.

The graphics options are hugely comprehensive, with four screens of options available for you to tweak to your heart's content. There is also the configuration file too, but we've kept things as simple as possible by leaving that in its out of the box state. For our testing, we used a two minute section walking through a wooded area, down into a valley. This test scenario features lots of vegetation and trees, and is one of the most intense sections we've found in the game. We set all of the in-game details to their maximum settings, but left both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering disabled.



At lower resolutions, the E6850 was fractionally the fastest processor in Oblivion, but as the resolution increased the Core 2 Extreme QX6850 managed to stretch its legs and beat out the E6850 by around 1.2 percent at the same clock speed. Further down the performance chart, the E6750 managed to squeeze out a draw with the faster Core 2 Extreme X6800, even despite its 266MHz clock speed deficit; that said, the Core 2 Duo E6700 was only a fraction slower than both of these chips.

AMD's fastest single socket processor was just a few fractions of a frame per second slower than the competition and, really speaking, you're not going to notice any performance differences between these processors in a typical real-world gaming scenario as you'll be graphics limited once you start introducing anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering into the equation.