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.








Performance in Oblivion started off really well without anti-aliasing enabled, but once anti-aliasing was appled, Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB blitzed past the HD 2900 XT. Even worse is the fact that the Radeon X1950 XTX manages to outperform the Radeon HD 2900 XT at 1600x1200 4xAA 16xAF. Because ATI was touting HDR-plus-AA as the only way to play Oblivion, it appears to have come back and bitten its backside.

On the plus side, the Radeon HD 2900 XT's native CrossFire implementation does appear to be working pretty well. It doesn't manage to fend off competition from Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTS, but there is decent scaling across the broad spectrum of settings we've tested here. That's something that can't be said for Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire, which had pretty dismal scaling.