Of course, when talking about image quality, we don't mean non AA AF screenshots. Below are some AA and AF screenshots to look at. The first is with texture settings set to 'High', number of dynamic lights set to 'Normal' and soften smoke edges set to 'World Only'. The second screenshot is with 'Extra' and number of dynamic lights set to 'High' and soften smoke edges set to 'Everything'.
Apart from the textures, there's not much difference between the two (discount the fog / smoke). With a 4 fps loss, we got much sharper textures mostly on the nearest MIP levels. Everything else is pretty much the same. However, if you're playing at that setting, memory use for both video and main RAM is much, much larger. That's why only 512 MB cards are recommended with 'Extra' settings. However, that's not the whole story. Higher resolution textures also eats more bandwidth, sometimes more than what's available on the fastest cards available today. After much testing, we decided against using 'Extra' texture settings, because the frame rate will drop too low (below 25 fps at 1024 x 768 with AA and AF) at some points. We're pretty sure these drops are not system limited, since they do vary with resolution changes and AA / AF. Since this is a fast paced FPS game, we want to maintain at least a 25 fps minimum. So, we're using a much 'conservative' setting to benchmark Cal of Duty, which you can see below.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
By now, most of you will probably be sick to death hearing about this game. Well, bare with us since this is 'THE GAME' of 3D graphics review this month (and quite possibly this year). Oblivion is very demanding on your PC's processor, memory and graphics cards, all at the same time. With a variety of graphical settings, there's a plethora of tweaks you can use to bring your GeForce 7900 or Radeon X1900 cards to its knees. Graphically, it's the most impressive game out this year, especially with High Dynamic Range rendering enabled.For those of you who are not interested in discussing the quirks of Oblivion, you can jump to the settings we've chosen by clicking this link.
Despite the graphical splendor in the game, Oblivion is not without some quirks. For one, it's also a very system limited game. Most of the time, you'll see a very large drop in frame rates when you're viewing a character (even yourself). If you played the game, you'll know what we're talking about. Below is one example of this. This is the Arch-Mage's room in the Arcana University , quite possibly one of the smallest levels in the game (after all it's just one room). In first person mode, you'll get more than 150 fps here, regardless of whatever direction you're looking. However, switch to third person mode, you'll see the frame rate drops to around 70 fps. Actually, that's a 100 fps drop! Granted, there's more objects in the second screenshot, but that drop is just too much to be graphics related.
How about lots of characters? Well, if you play the game and follow the story, you'll see at least one or two scenes with lots of characters. One of the heaviest scenes is quite possibly the second battle of Bruma, the one with the Great Gate to Oblivion. You can see a screenshot we took below of that scene. Despite a very bland landscape with very little objects and quite far characters, we're seeing less than 30 fps.
There are two things we can do to make Oblivion a graphics benchmark. For one, we can use a fast enough processor to keep up with both the AI and graphics cards demands. However, we don't think this is the answer. Even with a faster processor, some scenes will likely be always system limited, particularly if there are characters in view. So, we choose another alternative - we simply choose scenes with no characters at all. We know that this hardly captures the gameplay of Oblivion, so in this regard our benchmarks is not fully representative of gameplay. This is a compromise, but it is a necessary one, otherwise the results will be system limited and won't tell us anything, graphical wise.
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