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.






Oblivion is interestingly a game where AMD's lacklustre anti-aliasing performance doesn't rear its ugly head because the Radeon HD 3870 doesn't let the GeForce 9600 GT run away with proceedings when 2xAA is applied. That said, the reference-clocked GeForce 9600 GT, because it's quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3850 across the board and manages to match the Radeon HD 3870 when anti-aliasing is disabled at both 1280x1024 and 1680x1050 – in that respect, it's all going to come down to price.

Another interesting point to note is how the GeForce 8800 GT and Zotac GeForce 9600 GT AMP! Edition perform when anti-aliasing is enabled. It's clear that the GeForce 8800 GT is being held back by the lack of memory bandwidth available to it because the game all of a sudden becomes very fillrate limited on the G92-based card.