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.








A familiar pattern is emerging - the shader clock deficit on the Zotac GeForce 8800 GTX AMP! Edition trailed EVGA's e-GeForce 8800 GTX KO Superclocked card by fractions of a frame per second across all of the resolutions tested here. The card also continued to have a decent performance margin - around five to eight percent - over the standard-clocked GeForce 8800 GTX we've also compared it to.

Probably the most impressive result is at 2560x1600 2xAA 16xAF, where the card almost performs on a par with two Radeon HD 2900 XTs in CrossFire. That is, of course, thanks to the lack of any working MSAA resolve hardware in R600 at the moment - we're not sure whether that's a permanent problem or can be fixed with a driver update.