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The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

As you can see, this part of the game is mostly system limited, somewhat. If you look at the HDR scores, you'll see the telltale signs of trouble for the GeForce 7900GTX at 1024 x 768, while both ATI cards simply ran full speed all the way up to 1280 x 1024. They even seem to ran faster with HDR, but that maybe just normal variations between runs. At 1600 x 1200, HDR is just painfully too slow on the GeForce 7900GTX, while both Radons continue to chug along. Mind you, this is with older, Forceware 84.21 reference driver. The beta driver for Oblivion might behave differently.

The Imperial City market district is not the most graphically intensive part of the game, and certainly don't look like the rest of Tamriel. We actually chose this part since it would make a great example of how system limited Oblivion is. But as you can see for yourself, it actually is a good indicator of HDR performance. AA and AF results are pretty equal on all three cards, with the EAX1800XT TOP slightly slower. Obviously, if you have a GeForce 7900GT/GTX or even a 7800GT/GTX/GS, you might want to consider using AA and AF than HDR and AF.


Ouch! Looks like all three cards are pretty much on their knees throughout this test. You simply don't want to play above 1024 x 768 with the settings we've chosen. Both the GeForce 7900GTX and Radeon X1900XTX are barely making the 30 fps minimum mark, though the GeForce 7900GTX is slightly faster. Looking back to Morrowind, it might take two or three generations into the future till we see a card that can handle Oblivion at higher resolutions.

Focusing on the 1024 x 768 results, the Radeon X1900XTX is faster without AA and AF and slightly slower with AA and AF than the GeForce 7900GTX. This is different that what most reviews are saying, but once you think about it, it makes sense. Remember, this benchmark has lots of grass made up of transparent textures. Bandwidth is less likely the problem here, since even the EAX1800XT TOP is slower. The culprit is likely texturing fill rate, one where the GeForce 7900GTX has more than the Radeon X1900XTX (more pipelines, more ROP units, relatively the same clock). In all likelihood, if we were to perform this benchmark on a GeForce 7800GTX, the results will confirm this. However, we don't have one right now, so we can't prove it for the time being. This highlights the need for ATI not just to have cards with higher clocked memory, but core as well.

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