ATI Radeon X1900XT 256MB

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.



In Oblivion, we found that the Radeon X1900XT 256MB delivered virtually the same gaming experience as it's more expensive 512MB brother on a CRT monitor. We were able to leave the texture detail at the highest setting, while all other settings were left at the same value too. The only exception to this was the 'shadows on grass' option, which had to be disabled on the 256MB Radeon X1900XT in order to prevent some hitching that we encounted with it turned on.

Due to the fact that ATI's Radeon X1000-series cards are capable of HDR and anti-aliasing at the same time while NVIDIA's cards can't, the gaming experience in Oblivion was unmatched by any of the three NVIDIA-based cards we compared the Radeon X1900XT 256MB to. With that said though, we still got a reasonably comparable gaming experience from the two GeForce 7950 GT cards albeit without any anti-aliasing.