EVGA e-GeForce 7900 GT KO Superclock

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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.


We found that the EVGA e-GeForce 7900 GT KO Superclock was able to play the game at 1600x1200 0xAA 8xAF with HDR enabled, no grass and medium-low shadow detail. Gameplay was pretty smooth at this resolution, and the game looked pretty good. With high-quality driver details turned on, we didn't see any obvious shimmering throughout the portions of the game that we played.

On the other hand, the ATI Radeon X1900XT yielded a slightly improved gaming experience, thanks to the R580 GPU's ability to render both HDR and Anti-Aliasing at the same time. All other details remained the same as the EVGA e-GeForce 7900 GT KO Superclock and the frame rate and experience was very similar.

The fact that we were able to turn HDR and Anti-Aliasing on at the same time improved the gameplay experience in built up areas, as there were fewer jaggies on the edges of buildings. Anti-Aliasing didn't make as much of a difference when running around the hills, because there are very few jaggies to remove. The differences were much more subtle and this is to the credit of Bethesda for creating an engine that doesn't require massive amounts of Anti-Aliasing.