Leadtek WinFast PX7600 GT TDH

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.

We had to lower the shadow detail a little when playing Oblivion on Leadtek's WinFast PX7600 GT TDH in order to maintain smooth gameplay. With the shadow detail sliders set half way along, there were several occasions where the gaming experience was adversely affected by stuttering and hitching.

First, we tried playing the game with texture detail set to high, only to find that this caused some of the stuttering too. Obviously, the BFG Tech's GeForce 7600 GT OC was slightly faster than the Leadtek card as a result of the higher frequencies that it operates at. Along with that, the Radeon X1800GTO was slightly faster too - it performed similarly to BFG Tech's 7600 GT. The additional shadow detail didn't make a massive difference to the gaming experience in all honesty.

Had there been additional effects, like tree canopy shadows or some grass, the gameplay experience would have been massively better on both the Radeon X1800GTO and the BFG Tech GeForce 7600 GT OC. While the on-screen gaming experience wasn't much better on the BFG Tech 7600 GT OC and ATI's Radeon X1800GTO, the one area where Leadtek's card excelled was the noise it made (or rather, didn't make) when playing Oblivion.