PowerColor Radeon X1950 Pro 256MB

24" Widescreen Gaming:

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.

The native resolution of our 24” widescreen monitor really hurt these cards and we found we had to lower quite a lot of the detail settings in order to achieve smooth frame rates. The gaming experience was far from optimal, but all of the cards were at least capable of playing the game at this resolution.

PowerColor’s Radeon X1950 Pro was capable of playing the game with higher quality settings than Sapphire’s Radeon X1950 Pro. In particular, we were able to increase the shadow quality by a few notches, meaning that we had fuller and more realistic shadows. Both Radeon X1950 Pro’s were faster than the two BFG Tech GeForce 7-series cards, but the ATI Radeon X1900XT 256MB was the pick of the bunch again.

Oblivion is one of the most shader-heavy games out there at the moment, and it seems to make full use of the card’s 48 pixel shader processors. We were also able to play the game with 2xAA enabled in conjunction with HDR, meaning that all of the jagged edges were smoothed out a bit.