Connect3D & Sapphire Radeon X1900GT

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - Widescreen gaming

Along with testing Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion at CRT resolutions, we also tested the three video cards at the native resolution for a 24" widescreen LCD because this is becoming an increasingly popular choice among gaming enthusiasts. This game is incredibly stressful, so we found that we had to lower details significantly in order to maintain acceptable frame rates.

We used the same range of testing scenarios as were used in the previous section of this review. The frame rates displayed below relate to the most stressful of the three benchmark hotspots that that we used - the scenario with heavy vegetation on the walk up to the first Oblivion gate outside Kvach.


Again, we were impressed with the way that the Radeon X1900GT's held up at 1920x1200. In order to attain a playable gaming experience, we had to lower the texture size to medium, and also lower the fade distances, shadow details and specular distance a little. We also had to disable tree canopy shadows too. The settings that we were left with were higher than what we had experienced on the two GeForce 7900 GT's we reviewed two weeks ago.

There was a little bit more pop up than what we experienced at the lower resolutions with higher details, but the game play experience was still very impressive at this high resolution.

The XFX GeForce 7900 GT XXX Edition held up to the abuse that Oblivion can dish out at 1920x1200 too. Again, we had to turn tree canopy shadows off and set the texture detail to 'Medium' in order to maintain an acceptable frame rate. However, all other details were left set to Medium-High settings. We were also able to leave 16xAF applied and HDR on, too. The card closed the gap on the Radeon X1900GT at this high resolution, but it didn't surpass it unfortunately.

More tweaking was required to get an acceptable frame rate on the BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GT OC, but we were still able to play the game with reasonably high details for this resolution - we were able to leave HDR enabled and also leave 16xAF on too. Most of the details were set about mid-way along the sliders, with shadows on reasonably low settings.

The 1920x1200 native resolution of 24" widescreen LCDs really killed the BFG Tech GeForce 7800 GT OC. In order to get the game playable, we had to turn full HDR off and settle for Bloom. All of the fade settings were lowered to about a third of the way along the slider, with shadows completely turned off. The draw distance was left at its maximum setting though, as the game experience really deteriorates when this is lowered significantly. The game was perfectly playable at these settings, but it looked a bit weird, at least compared to what we're used to playing Oblivion at.