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.








Frame rates are very comfortable on the BFGTech GeForce 8600 GTS OC2 ThermoIntelligence right the way up to 1680x1050 2xAA 16xAF with the in-game detail settings we've tested at here. We're sure that, at 1280x1024 with anti-aliasing enabled, there is room for higher in-game quality settings - you'd be able to turn the grass detail up to at least 25 percent.

At the lower resolutions, the card keeps up well with a GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB in the fairly mid-range minded system we've used for testing here, but there's a high chance that you'll get more out of the card in a system with a faster CPU installed.