Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro

24" Widescreen Gaming

For gameplay evaluations on a CRT monitor, please head straight 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.



The high resolution really killed the Radeon X1950 Pro and GeForce 7900 GS. With all four of the 256MB cards tested, we found that we had to lower texture detail to Medium in order to maintain smooth gameplay. With large textures enabled, there were consistent periods where the game stuttered quite badly and was a far cry from acceptable frame rates.

Just like our standard resolution test, Sapphire’s Radeon X1950 Pro was faster than both the BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GS OC and the GeForce 7900 GT OC cards at 1920x1200. We were able to play the game smoothly with increase shadow details and also a higher specular distance. In order to prevent more stuttering in game, we had to lower the specular distance on both of the BFG Tech cards. This meant that the game was not quite as immersive, as the lighting wasn’t quite so dramatic.