ATI Radeon X1950XTX

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.

As mentioned on our test setup page, we used a 'Chuck' modded version of the Catalyst drivers with support for the Radeon X1950XTX. This allowed us to enable anti-aliasing at the same time as enabling HDR lighting. We found that the game was perfectly smooth and very playable at 1600x1200 with 2x quality adaptive anti-aliasing and 16x HQ AF enabled. We were able to turn the grass detail up to about half way, while both internal and external shadows were set half way along the respective sliders. Along with this, we enabled tree canopy shadows and set shadow filtering to low.

The BFGTech GeForce 7950 GX2 was unable to run with both HDR and anti-aliasing enabled at the same time, and the difference was quite startling in built up areas of the game. The differences were less-obvious in the wooded areas but if you've got eyes that are sensitive to aliasing, you'll be able to tell the difference without too much trouble at all. Despite this, the GeForce 7950 GX2 was capable of playing the game with higher details, but we had to enable high quality anisotropic filtering to remove some harsh mipmap transitions and texture shimmering.

Sapphire's Radeon X1900XTX was also capable of playing the game with 2x AA / 16x HQ AF enabled at 1600x1200. However, in order to attain a smooth frame rate, we had to drop the grass detail down a little. We had to lower the details further to attain a smooth frame rate on the BFGTech GeForce 7900 GTX OC.

Overall, we felt that the Radeon X1950XTX delivered the best gaming experience out of the cards tested in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion when using a CRT.