Quad SLI part deux: Build It Yourself

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 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 tested the game with both HDR and anti-aliasing (with Bloom) enabled to gauge whether Quad SLI is a better proposition than a pair of GeForce 7900 GTX's in SLI.


We found that the BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC SLI configuration was faster than the pair of XFX GeForce 7950 GX2 Extreme's in Quad SLI both with HDR (and no AA) and Bloom (with AA) enabled at playable frame rates. Both setups were capable of playing the game at 2560x1600 with everything except grass and self shadows enabled with either HDR or 2xAA enabled (in conjunction with Bloom).

In both situations, we found that the BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC SLI setup delivered a noticeably smoother gaming experience - there were occasional stutters with Quad SLI. Thankfully though, we didn't experience any crashing in this title - we experienced our fair share of crashing the last time we tested Quad SLI in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

We tried playing the game with higher detail settings on the Quad SLI configuration to see if we could improve our visual experience with Bloom enabled. With 4xAA and no transparency supersampling, the stuttering was even more apparent and was a major annoyance. The frame rates recorded reflected our in-game experiences - the average frame rate was a mere 27 frames per second.

We increased the Anti-Aliasing levels even further to 8xSLI AA - the setting that NVIDIA recommends for most DirectX 9 titles - and found that the experience was even worse. In some games, we got a very similar frame rate at 4xAA and 8xSLI AA. It was a little different in Oblivion, as Quad SLI delivered an average frame rate of 23 frames per second, and the minimum was under 10 frames per second with 8xSLI AA enabled.