The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

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. We set all of the in-game details to their maximum settings, but left both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering disabled.



The Core 2 Duo E6750 is one and a half frames per second faster than the similarly clocked E6700 at 1024x768, but that advantage disappears when you increase the resolution to 1600x1200.

Supreme Commander

We used the full retail version of Supreme Commander with the version 3223 patch applied. Supreme Commander is developed by Chris Taylor, the creator of the Total Annihilation series, and his development team, Gas Powered Games. Together, Taylor and his team have created what is widely regarded as the spiritual successor to one of the greatest RTS games of all time.

SupCom is a hugely tactical and strategic monster on a massive scale -- hundreds of units can appear on screen at once. It's a massive departure from anything else we've recently seen in the genre. It's one of (if not) the first RTS to allow the player to scroll out to view the scale of battle in its entirety.

Due to the game's massive scale, it is said to show some decent performance improvements with quad-core processors -- we'll be having a look at this closer over the next few weeks. We used the game's in-built performance test during our testing, as this provides over seven minutes of variable gameplay -- both zoomed in and out -- that should represent typical scenarios that a user is likely to encounter whilst playing the game. We set all details to their maximum values and, again, left anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering disabled.



We saw some pretty decent scaling in Supreme Commander, with everything set to the highest details. Even at 1600x1200, there were pronounced performance differences, with the E6750 being almost four percent faster than the E6700 with only the increased bus speed to pin that performance increase onto.