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.
As one would expect, the overclocked Core 2 Quad Q6600 in both the Asus P5K Deluxe and the XFX nForce 680i SLI boards outperform Intel’s flagship Core 2 Extreme QX6850 processor by small but unnoticeable margins. Processor speed doesn’t really make a fat lot of difference in Oblivion at higher resolutions and it’ll make even of a difference when you’ve got anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled.
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