XFX GeForce 7950 GT 570M Extreme

CRT Gaming

For gameplay evaluations on a 24" widescreen monitor, please head straight to our widescreen 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.

The XFX GeForce 7950 GT 570M Extreme delivered a generally good gaming experience in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on a CRT monitor - we were almost able to turn on the maximum in-game details at 1280x1024, while maintaining smooth gameplay. 1280x1024 is obviously a 5:4 resolution, but we chose to use it over the correct 4:3 resolution because many gamers are running 17" or 19" LCD monitors.

When using NVIDIA's default driver setting, we experienced quite a large amount of texture shimmering that we deemed unacceptable when you're spending upwards of £200 on a video card. ATI's filtering quality is not shimmer free, but it's certainly a lot better than NVIDIA's default quality setting when high quality anisotropic filtering is turned on (it is a given on Radeon X1900-series cards).

We were able to increase the grass and shadow details on XFX's overclocked 7950 GT, compared to NVIDIA's reference design clock speeds. This bought general in-game image quality up to a similar level to what we could achieve on the Radeon X1900XT 512MB. We were able to turn 2xAA on for the Radeon X1900XT - this gave some image quality benefits to the ATI card, along with the slight advantages in filtering quality. ATI's Radeon X1900XT 512MB delivered the better gaming experience in this title.