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.






While Oblivion doesn't highlight the same shortcomings with ATI's current anti-aliasing implementation as other games do, BFG Tech's GeForce 9600 GT OC 512MB graphics card performs very well across the board. It delivers very smooth frame rates right the way up to 1680x1050 2xAA 16xAF, with minimum frame rates in excess of 30 fps - there's probably room for even higher in-game quality settings in that respect.

The BFG Tech GeForce 9600 GT OC maintains a five to six percent gap over the Radeon HD 3870 512MB card, while also managing to deliver frame rates that are around 12 percent faster than those returned by the PowerColor Radeon HD 3850 Xtreme PCS. However, the average frame rates are quite high for this title. And, in fact, the real difference is is in the minimum frame rates, which drop into the low twenties in a worst case scenario on both the Radeon HD 3870 and the PowerColor Radeon HD 3850 Xtreme.