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.








Again, XFX's 8600 GT 620M XXX puts up another strong fight in Oblivion, as it manages to outperform the Radeon X1950 Pro at all three resolutions without anti-aliasing enabled, and at both 1024x768 and 1280x1024 with 2xAA applied. At 1680x1050 2xAA 16xAF, neither card is truly playable with the in-game settings that we've used so, in order to achieve smooth frame rates at this resolution with AA enabled, you'll have to reduce the in-game quality settings.