ATI Radeon X1950XTX

24" Widescreen Gaming

For gameplay evaluations on a CRT, please head back 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.

Both the Radeon X1950XTX and Radeon X1900XTX were both capable of playing Oblivion with 2x AA and 16x HQ AF enabled on our 24" widescreen monitor. The Radeon X1950XTX delivered the best gaming experience, with smooth frame rates and decent detail settings. The grass distance slider was set to half way along, meaning that there was a reasonably good amount of grass present. Internal and external shadows were set half way along the slider too, while tree canopy shadows were enabled and shadow filtering was set to low. Every other setting was at its maximum value in the video settings control panel.

The Radeon X1900XTX was playable at similar settings, but we had to turn grass off completely to attain a smooth gaming experience. Meanwhile the BFGTech GeForce 7950 GX2 was capable of playing the game with the same in-game settings as the Radeon X1950XTX, but without anti-aliasing enabled. This meant that there was lots of edge aliasing in built up areas, and trees didn't look quite as good in rural areas of the game.

ATI's Radeon X1950XTX simply delivered a much better gaming experience than the BFGTech GeForce 7950 GX2 in Oblivion.