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.








At 1280x1024, the resolution you're most likely to use the HIS Radeon HD 2600 XT at, it performs similarly albeit slightly slower than the Asus EN8600GT with no anti-aliasing - both maintain smooth and playable frame rates for this type of game. When you apply 2xAA though, things start to favour the GeForce 8600 GT considerably, as it manages to maintain just-about-passable frame rates while HIS's card drops down well below 30 frames per second.