Foxconn FV-N88SMBD2-ONOC (8800 GTS)

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 1.1 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 did several manual run throughs to test the game in a variety of scenarios ranging from large amounts of draw distance, indoors and also large amounts of vegetation. Our vegetation run through is the result that we have shown, as it proved to be the most stressful - we walked up the hill to Kvach, where the first Oblivion gate is located.

24" widescreen gaming:

With Foxconn's pre-overclocked 8800 GTS, you will see some immediate gameplay benefits over BFGTech's reference-clocked GeForce 8800 GTS. We were able to attain smooth gameplay with 4xAA and transparency anti-aliasing enabled on Foxconn's card. This made quite a difference in the rural areas of the game, because it helped to reduce edge aliasing on the alpha-tested textures used for the tree leaves.

Although transparency multisampling does show some image quality improvements over standard edge anti-aliasing, the improvements aren't quite as profound as the image quality differences that come as a result of enabling transparency supersampling. As a result of this, the gaming experience delivered by Foxconn's 8800 GTS was noticeably better than the experience delivered by any reference-clocked GeForce 8800 GTS.

It wasn't quite enough to challenge NVIDIA's flagship GeForce 8800 GTX, but it was more than enough to dispose of any threat from ATI's ageing Radeon X1950XTX.

30" widescreen gaming:

Not surprisingly, at 2560x1600, Foxconn's factory overclocked GTS was able to play the game with higher in-game details enabled. This time, instead of improvements to transparency anti-aliasing quality, we opted for a higher grass detail. If you're familiar with Oblivion's quality settings, a higher grass detail simply means that there is more grass in the scene, making the game feel more immersive.

Again though, we found that Foxconn's card sat firmly in between the reference-clocked BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTS and the reference 8800 GTX, but overall performance was closer to BFGTech's 8800 GTS than the considerably faster GTX, proving that the additional stream processors and higher memory bandwidth really help the GTX in this title.