The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Publisher: 2K Games

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 -- especially when anti-aliasing is enabled at the same time as HDR.








The EVGA e-GeForce 8800 Ultra’s performance is neck and neck with the Radeon HD 2900 XT CrossFire configuration when anti-aliasing is enabled, but if you prefer to play games without anti-aliasing, you’ll find that the Radeon HD 2900 XT CrossFire configuration is quite a bit faster all the way up to 2560x1600. A pair of BFGTech’s GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB OC cards in SLI makes for an even faster configuration at the same price point when anti-aliasing is enabled, but that obviously depends whether you’re into the whole multi-GPU game, or not.

Not surprisingly, when you compare EVGA’s new flagship aircooled card to other high-end single card solutions, the picture is a pretty rosy one. It’s five percent faster than the reference clocked 8800 Ultra, nine percent faster than EVGA’s previous flagship card and almost 19 percent faster than a standard clocked GeForce 8800 GTX.