XFX GeForce 7950 GT 570M Extreme

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.

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).

As with our CRT testing, the Radeon X1900XT was capable of playing the game at the same settings as the XFX GeForce 7950 GT 570M Extreme, but with high quality anisotropic filtering and 2xAA enabled as well. We were impressed with how well these cards performed, but again the edge went to ATI's Radeon X1900XT by virtue of the fact it is capable of FP16 HDR and anti-aliasing at the same time.

We had to lower the shadow details a little in order to attain a smooth gaming experience on the reference GeForce 7950 GT card. We had to lower the internal and external sliders down to half way, and also turn shadow filtering off completely.