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.






Again, we have another situation where CrossFire scaling is good – this means the Radeon HD 3870 X2 delivers higher frame rates and a better gaming experience than BFG Tech’s GeForce 9800 GTX OCX at roughly the same price point. The other thing to note in Oblivion is that the Radeon HD 3870 X2 doesn’t suffer from the often crazy performance drop associated with its lack of hardware-based MSAA resolve functionality – that just makes the performance a little sweeter on the X2 and it’s not all that far behind Nvidia’s flagship GeForce 9800 GX2.