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.






In Oblivion, Inno3D's GeForce 8600 GTS iChiLL Xstriker3 performs respectably and is faster than both the Radeon X1950 XT 256MB and Radeon X1950 Pro at 1280x1024 regardless of whether anti-aliasing is enabled or not. At 1680x1050, it's no longer faster than the X1950 XT 256MB when anti-aliasing is disabled, but it's not far behind it and is faster once 2xAA is applied.

Additionally, the card does still maintain a performance advantage over the Radeon X1950 Pro in all scenarios.