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 tells a different story to most of the games we’ve tested here, as it’s a scenario where ATI’s lacklustre anti-aliasing performance doesn’t rear its ugly head. When anti-aliasing is enabled, the HIS Radeon HD 3850 IceQ 3 TurboX is faster than Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GS by around eight percent, but it’s still a few percentage points slower than Nvidia’s GeForce 9600 GT.

The GeForce 8800 GS’s problems are related to either memory bandwidth or framebuffer size though, because the card’s performance jumps back up to the same level as the GeForce 9600 GT when AA is turned off. And while we're mentioning memory bandwidth limitations, it's worth drawing your attention to the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB's behaviour. It's considerably faster than the both the GeForce 9600 GT and the pre-overclocked HIS Radeon HD 3850 512MB when AA is disabled, but the gap is dramatically reduced when AA is turned on.