GeForce 7900 GT head-to-head

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - CRT gaming

Publisher: 2K Games

We used the latest addition to the impressive Elder Scrolls series of titles, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. 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 found that the lack of antialiasing when HDR was enabled wasn't too much of a problem at 1280x1024. Admittedly, it'd be nice to have antialiasing with HDR, but we feel that HDR helps to improve the gaming experience and also the immersiveness of the world. Initially, we felt that 1024x768 was the best resolution to run a GeForce 7800 GT at, but we found that - with some tweaking - we were able to get a good experience at 1280x1024.

The BFG Tech 7900 GT OC was playable with a higher texture detail, and also higher in-game detail settings too. Unfortunately, enabling tree canopy shadows resulted in a large performance hit, so we decided to disable them in order to make the rest of the world look a little better - we felt that we could live without the shadows, but having a poor draw distance on objects and grass would ultimately make the game less enjoyable and immersive.

Finally, the XFX GeForce 7900 GT XXX Edition was able to play Oblivion with higher in-game detail settings and texture detail set to 'high'. Also, we were able to turn on tree canopy shadows to improve the gaming experience. They do improve the experience quite dramatically, but we wouldn't recommend turning it on if you're not using high fade details and maximum grass details.