Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra

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.


With 0xAA applied, we’re seeing an almost linear performance increase in line with the shader clock speed bump. At 1600x1200 0xAA, the performance improvement was just below 10 percent. Moving to 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 saw the Ultra’s performance advantage over the 8800 GTX increase to just over 10 percent. The shader clock increase is roughly 11 percent, so scaling here isn’t too far off what we’d expect in a perfect scenario.

Once anti-aliasing is enabled, the Ultra’s advantage over the GTX is improved because memory bandwidth really starts to come into play. At 1600x1200 4xAA, the gap wasn’t extended much beyond 10 percent – that’s because 1600x1200 4xAA isn’t exactly ‘taxing’ for graphics cards with this kind of horsepower available, at least not when there is over 100GB per second of memory bandwidth on hand. Things changed a bit at 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 though, as we saw 13.4 and 12.6 percent frame rate improvements at 1920x1200 4xAA and 2560x1600 2xAA.

At 1920x1200, this resulted in slightly smoother gameplay, but things were already fairly smooth on an 8800 GTX anyway. However, at 2560x1600, it was the difference between choppy frame rates and very playable frame rates.