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There are a lot of other graphical settings in Oblivion, but to keep this article short, we won't discuss them all. Out of these other settings, we disable two for our benchmarks - 'Self Shadows' because,well, it doesn't work quite right and 'Shadows on grass' which is very heavy on NVIDIA cards and causes texture flashing on ATI cards. All other settings are set to their maximum values (Full, High or On).



To keep the results 'relevant' to gameplay, we choose three scenes with elements you'll find everywhere in the world of Oblivion. The first scene is in Imperial City Market District, walking around the level from the spawn point. With several AI in the scenes, we expect this scene to be very system limited. The second scene is the one we've shown with the grass, near Harm's Folly. With lots of grass, there's actually very few objects or trees in this scene. The third one is what we call the Tree test, with both generous amounts of trees and grass. This scene is in the Great Forest area, where we walked south from Fort Coldcorn, heading towards Glademist Cave. All benchmarks are done in first person mode, with the above settings.

Performance

AA and AF settings are applied in game, whenever possible. We had to apply AF from the driver panel for NFS:MW and Oblivion. In Call of Duty, we enable both AA and AF from the graphical menu, but we change the number of AF samples to 16 with the command 'r_anisotropy' set to 16. V sync was disabled both from inside the game and on the driver panel. Image quality settings was set to 'High Quality'. In addition to the Radeon X1900XTX and GeForce 7900GTX, we also tested a slightly higher clocked X1800XT from ASUS, the EAX1800XT TOP for comparison purposes.

We'd like to thank both Tagan and Kingston for supplying with the additional power supply and 1 GB memory modules for this article.

Our test setup
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ socket 939
2 x 1024 MB Kingston KVR 3-3-3 PC3200 DDR-SDRAM
MSI K8N NForce 4 SLI motherboard
GeForce 7900GTX DDR3 512 MB graphics card
Radeon X1900XTX DDR3 512 MB graphics card
ASUS EAX1800XT TOP DDR3 512 MB graphics card
(running at standard clocks - core 700 MHz / memory 800 MHz (1600 MHz effective))
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GB Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
ASUS E-616 DVD-ROM
Tagan TG530-U15 530 watts ATX/BTX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
ATI Catalyst 6.4 reference driver
NVIDIA Forceware 84.21 reference driver
NVIDIA NForce 4 6.70 reference driver
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit 5.12.1.512 driver.
DirectX 9.0c

Performance

The results:

The graphs are pretty self explanatory, but in case you can't see the text, they're arranged in groups of three colors: green for minimum fps, blue for average fps and red for maximum fps. The first group represent test results under default settings, and the second represent results with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled.The third group, if present, are HDR with AF results. These results are in frame rate per second.

NFS: Most Wanted

It does look like the Radeon X1900XTX is faster than the GeForce 7900GTX, but the differences can still be attributed to normal variations between runs, at least at 1024 x 768 and 1280 x 1024 (2 - 3 fps). It's only at 1600 x 1200 do we see a confirmation of this - while both cards' average fps is nearly identical, the minimum fps is higher on the Radeon X1900XTX, much like it is at 1024 x 768 and 1280 x 1024. If that's not enough proof for you, let's at how these three cards progress through the benchmark.

	GeForce 7900GTX		EAX 1800XT TOP		Radeon X1900XTX
	Default	4x AA 16x AF	Default	4x AA 16x AF	Default	4x AA 16x AF
<30 fps	2	4	3	10	0	3
30-45 fps	16	19	23	32	13	28
45-60 fps	18	18	17	4	24	13
60-90 fps	11	6	4	1	10	3
90-120 fps	0	0	0	0	0	0
>120 fps	0	0	0	0	0	0
Total	47	47	47	47	47	47

results are in seconds

In case you're wondering, the table above is actually a brokedown of the benchmark results, displaying the time spent throughout the replay organized into several different frame rates ranges. Because this is a replay and not a timedemo, the replay runtime is the same between all cards. With a timedemo, the total number of seconds will vary according to settings, ie a heavier setting will have a higher number of seconds because the benchmarks takes longer to finish.

If you look at the progress graph, there's at least two areas that's quite interesting. On the first drop, the Radeon X1900XTX offers a higher frame rate than the GeForce 7900GTX, but on the last drop, the two are virtually neck to neck with the Radeon X1900XTX just edging out the GeForce 7900GTX. Unfortunately, the graph can't show what we can see in the table - throughout the rest of the gameplay, the GeForce 7900GTX spent less time between 30 - 45 fps than the Radeon X1900XTX.

Now, this becomes much more subjective. Do you prefer a slightly higher fps but with some sharper drops of the GeForce 7900GTX or the slightly lower fps but more shallow drops of the Radeon X1900XTX? Personally, we like the more 'sustained' frame rate of the Radeon X1900XTX better, because we notice less of a lag / stutter when playing. Frame rate wise, we think these results is convincing enough to say that both cards can still handle this game quite well and are evenly matched.

NFS: Most Wanted

	7900GTX			X1800XT TOP			X1900XTX
	Default	AA AF	Performance Lost	Default	AA AF	Performance Lost	Default	AA AF	Performance Lost
1024
Min	30	31	-3.33%	29	33	-13.79%	33	33	0.00%
Avg	55.64	56.91	-2.29%	57.98	57.83	0.26%	60.49	58.22	3.75%
Max	79	79	0.00%	76	78	-2.63%	78	75	3.85%
Average			-1.87%			-5.39%			2.53%
1280
Min	30	28	6.67%	31	29	6.45%	30	32	-6.67%
Avg	54.81	52.13	4.88%	53.95	46.77	13.31%	58.14	53.27	8.39%
Max	73	73	0.00%	78	76	2.56%	74	77	-4.05%
Average			3.85%			7.44%			-0.78%
1600
Min	26	24	7.69%	22	20	9.09%	32	26	18.75%
Avg	50.45	45.33	10.14%	44	36.78	16.42%	51.5	43.89	14.79%
Max	73	77	-5.48%	72	69	4.17%	76	73	3.95%
Average			4.12%			9.89%			12.50%
Weighted Average			2.03%			3.98%			4.75%

From the frame rates, it's easy enough to conclude that both the GeForce 7900GTX and Radeon X1900XTX is fast enough for comfortable gameplay at least up to 1280 x 1024 in NFS: Most Wanted with virtually maximum detail. At higher resolutions, the Radeon X1900XTX slightly edges the GeForce 7900GTX with its higher minimum fps, but you probably will still notice the drop anyway.

Due to the variability of results (from normal variations between runs), it's hard to estimate just how much performance we lost with higher resolutions and AA / AF. The trend seems to show that the GeForce 7900GTX is more efficient here. However, if you look at the results from the EAX1800XT TOP, you'll notice it's also slightly more efficient than the standard Radeon X1900XTX, so maybe all the Radeon X1900XTX needs is a slightly higher clocked core and memory. Or at least more time for the driver developers to 'fine tune' the driver for the Radeon X1900XTX. This is most likely true here, particularly with a sharp drop in efficiency at 1600 x 1200. It's too large a drop , so it can't be just normal variations between runs.

With this in mind, we can't really say from this benchmark alone which one will fare better with future games. So, lets hold our conclusions and look at the next game in our benchmark suite, Call of Duty 2.

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