GeForce 7950 GX2 Retail Round-up

CRT Gaming

For gameplay evaluations on a 24" widescreen monitor, please head straight to our widescreen 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.

The XFX GeForce 7950 GX2 570M XXX Edition was not surprisingly the fastest video card in Oblivion when using a CRT. We were able to maximise every single in-game option, with the exception of Self Shadows, which don't look quite right when they're enabled. The standard clocked GeForce 7950 GX2 wasn't too far behind the pre-overclocked XFX 570M XXX Edition, but there were some differences in image quality in order to attain the same level of smoothness. We had to lower shadow details and grass details a little in order to maintain a good gaming experience. Every other setting was left set to its maximum value.

One disadvantage that the GeForce 7950 GX2's have is that they're unable to process both HDR and anti-aliasing at the same time. This is unlike the Radeon X1900XTX, which is capable of processing both at the same time. The legendary Chuck patch gives ATI an immediate gameplay advantage over the competing NVIDIA cards, no matter how much faster they are. Smooth edges make quite a sizeable gameplay difference in built up areas, where there are lots of aliased edges to smooth out - the difference isn't quite as apparent when you're running around in the open though.

The BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC was the slowest of the cards tested, as we had to reduce the shadow detail down to 'low' in order to attain a smooth frame rate. Performance was still very good, but it was out-classed by the Radeon X1900XTX due to feature set disadvantages. There is no support for HDR and anti-aliasing, so the Radeon X1900XTX has a distinct advantage when it comes to highest-playable image quality.