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.
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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Posted by Mother-Goose - Wed Jul 25 2007 08:56
I'll give it a spin on my striker then, just upping the fsb and no voltage tinkering etc and see what I get out of it!
On a side note, would the scythe fit on the striker? My freezer 7 is barely able to, in fact the fan had to be mounted two fins higher than it should.
Spot on review though, Q6600 Cheesecake!
p.s. I love the Clarksonian POWEEEEEER!!!!1
Posted by cosmic - Wed Jul 25 2007 09:33
Looking forward to see what is possible with a G0 stepping Q6600.
Posted by LeMaltor - Wed Jul 25 2007 09:44
Posted by [EOCF] Tim - Wed Jul 25 2007 09:58
One thing that I did very much like was the games, and that you actually (as one of the very few) listed the minimum fps. One thing that bothers me, is that a lot of review sites that review CPU's in games, bench them with Average fps. They might even do it in higher resolutions (thank goodness) and with AA and AF. But there is going to be no difference in average fps between CPU's on higher resolutions. But you can see the difference, (even at higher resolutions) with minimum fps as we saw from this excellent review.
I'd like to ask you a big favour. Could you please next time bench the games with AA and AF enabled at normal resolutions (1280x1024, 1600x1200 or widescreen etc), and at the same time keep using the minimum fps as well. I think that'd be an eye opener, since I was quite convinced that you don't need a powerful CPU when your gaming at high resolution and AA and AF.
I mean, the average can be within 1 fps of one another, but what we saw from the 1600x1200 benches, that the minimum fps changed quite a bit. If we would be able to get 28fps mimimum with an old 3800+, and 35fps min. with a Q2D or Q2Q, then obviously the Q2D would deliver a better gaming experience.
So, this was a great review, everything was done right, quite a few games, and what's fantastic that it had minimum fps for the reasons listed above. But one addition could be to add some 4xAA 16xAF, to really see what a cpu can do for the mimimum framerate, being the best playable experience delivered.
Again thanks, and a big thumbsup.