EVGA e-GeForce 7900 GT KO Superclock

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.



At 1920x1200, we had to lower the shadow details and specular distance on both video cards in order to attain a smooth gaming experience. Shadow detail had to be set slightly lower on the EVGA e-GeForce 7900 GT KO Superclock in order to maintain smooth gameplay. The Radeon X1900XT didn't suffer in the same respect, as its minimum frame rate was high - the main problem was keeping the average frame rate high enough not to be spending the majority of the game under 30 fps.

We were unable to turn Anti-Aliasing on at this resolution - the minimum frame rate dropped down to around 14 frames per second, while the average frame rate was below 30 fps. We also tried turning the grass details up a little without success - the minimum frame rate was fine at 18 fps, but the average dropped down to about 29 frames per second. There were slight advantages to the Radeon X1900XT, but it was hard to tell the difference between the two in a blind taste test.