GeForce 7950 GX2 Retail Round-up

24" Widescreen Gaming

For gameplay evaluations on a CRT, please head back to our CRT performance section.

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 details on all video cards after increasing the resolution to the screen's native 1920x1200. The XFX GeForce 7950 GX2 570M XXX Edition was still the fastest video card on show, but it still lacked the features required to put doubters at rest - the lack of HDR and anti-aliasing at the same time may tempt people away from the GeForce 7950 GX2. Both grass and shadow detail were lowered to what we would call 'medium' detail levels, while everything else was left at the maximum value.

The reference clocked GeForce 7950 GX2 was not much slower than the pre-overclocked XFX 570M XXX Edition, but we did have to lower some details in order to attain an equally smooth frame rate. Shadows on grass had to be turned off, while shadow details and grass distance had to be reduced a little.

We had to lower the settings even further to attain smooth gameplay on the Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX and BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC. Shadows were on a very low setting, with all additional shadow controls turned off; grass distance was set to an equally low value to keep the frame rates at acceptable levels. The one saving grace for the Radeon X1900XTX was its ability to run both HDR and anti-aliasing at the same time - this helped to smooth sharp edges in built up areas of the game.