The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion GPU Performance
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 26, 2006 1:07 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
When both Doom 3 and Half Life 2 came out we burned the midnight oil trying to put together guides for CPU and GPU performance in the games as soon as they were released. Much to our surprise, especially given the performance hype that had preceeded both of them, both games ran relatively well on most mainstream hardware that was available at the time. One GPU generation later and the worries about performance under Doom 3 and Half Life 2 were yesterday's news. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said about Bethesda Softworks' latest immersive RPG: Oblivion.
The game itself is more addicting and immersive than any of its predecessors and its reviews confirm that. But we're not here to tell you that the game is great, we're here to tell you what you need to run it. The fact of the matter is that Oblivion is the most stressful game we've ever encountered, taking the crown away from F.E.A.R. as something that simply doesn't run well on anything. Obtaining good performance under Oblivion is so hard that a number of optimization guides have popped up helping users do whatever it takes to make the game playable. At AnandTech we've been using the Oblivion Tweak Guide from Tweakguides.com and recommend reading it if you're looking to get a good idea for the impact of the many visual settings available in the game.
Just as we've done in our previous articles on Doom 3 and Half Life 2, we're splitting our Oblivion performance coverage into multiple parts. This first part will focus on high-end and mid-range PCIe GPU performance and future articles will look at CPU performance as well as low-end GPU and AGP platform performance if there is enough demand for the latter two. Where we take this series of articles in the future will depend on many of your demands and requests, so please make them heard.
Benchmarking Oblivion
There are really three types of areas you encounter while playing Oblivion, you'll find your character either: 1) Outdoors, 2) Inside a town but still outdoors, or 3) Inside a building or dungeon. Interestingly enough, our seemingly haphazard list of Oblivion locales is actually organized in ascending order of performance. You'll encounter your absolute highest performance inside buildings while you'll actually contemplate spending $1200 on graphics cards whenever you find yourself outside. It only made sense that we benchmarked in each of those three areas, so we constructed manually scripted (read: walk-throughs by hand) benchmarks taking us through one of each type of area in Oblivion.
Oblivion Gate Benchmark
The first test is our Oblivion Gate benchmark, which just so happens to be the most stressful out of all three. In this test we've spotted an Oblivion gate in The Great Forest and walk towards it as scamps attempt to attack our character. The benchmark takes place in a heavily wooded area with lots of grass; combined with the oblivion gate itself, even the fastest GPUs will have trouble breaking 30 fps here.
Town Benchmark
The next test takes place in the town of Bruma and simply features our character walking through a portion of the town. There are a few other characters on screen but no major interaction takes place. Despite the simplicity of the test, since it takes place outside the frame rate is already quite stressful on some mid-range GPUs.
Dungeon Benchmark
Our final test takes place in the Sanctum on our way to the Imperial City prisons; this "Dungeon" benchmark showcases indoor area performance and consists of our character sneaking through the dimly lit Sanctum. There are guards around however none appear in the view of our character. Many cards will do well in this test, but unless they can pass the first benchmark their performance here is meaningless.
We measured frame rates using FRAPS and reported both the minimum and average frame rates in our charts (we left out maximum frame rates because they simply aren't as important and they made the graphs a little too difficult to read when we included them). The minimum frame rates are indicated by a vertical white line inside the bar representing average frame rate.
Since we measured performance using FRAPS and not through a scripted timedemo sequence, the amount of variance between runs is higher than normal; differences in performance of 5% or less aren't significant and shouldn't be treated as such.
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nullpointerus - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - link
Really? I follow most of this site's articles, and I've never run into this problem.cgrecu77 - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
this is the article I've been waiting for, I was leaning towards upgrading to x1800xt but wasn't sure.The game is easily one of the best i've played (and it's my first RPG, I'm a TBS fan). While it doesn't have the depth and replay value of series like Civ or HOMM, it's still far better than any FPS (can't compare with other RPGs) I ever played.
Whoever says that the graphics in Oblivion are not the best is just full of b..t or lacks the hardware to turn everything on, looking from the top of the mountain at the Imperial City on a clear moon night it simply breathtaking.
The gameplay and interface are also among the best I've seen and there are few occasions where I think: "this should have been improved". The inventory system is probably a weaker point, but even that is debatable (it's quite obvious that much thought was put into it but maybe the decisions taken there are not the greatest).
However, performance is a big issue. My system is middle to upper range (a64 3200, 2gb ram, x850XT) and I can barely play at 1280x1024 with all sliders to the top and without shadows or AA.
Outdoor I get ~20fps which is ok, actually even excelent considering the huge number of objects rendered (especially grass and trees) - and acceptable since most battles are inside. What I don't get is why I have such a poor performance indoors, there are moments in a heated dungeon battle (especially where there are many fires, like inside sigil towers) where frame rates drops to low teens (from mid 50s). Graphics are average in those building, I only battle 2-3 opponents or less, the map is quite small (since any door leads to loading times )- so I don't get it, how come the game slows to a crawl there. I would consider this an obvious place where optimizations are lacking. Another thing that's missing is a way to alter the grass length (from the game menu, most people only look there to alter settings) and a few other things that were proven to greatly improve performance.
oneils - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
The hit to performance in dungeons may be due to a mix of having the shadow detail and specular lighting (or filtering?) set too high. I have the same problem with my 6800gt. Especially when I am fighting spell casters. If we are both casting spells, the system crawls.DigitalFreak - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
Opteron 165 @ 2.51Ghz2GB RAM
Geforce 7900GTX SLI
Check the tweak guides. There is A LOT you can do to make it run smoother without lowering graphic settings.
bollwerk - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
I also have 7900GTX SLI and it also runs fine for me with maxed settings at 1920x1200. (Athlon 64 X2 3800+, 2GB ram, A8N32SLI) It's obviously not high FPS, but it's also not choppy at all as far as I can tell. Totally playable for an RPG. I'm loving it and I'm glad I didn't get the 360 version. The PC mods are soooo worth it.JarredWalton - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
But the tweak guides ARE lowering the graphics settings, just in a different way. I'm okay with 1920x1200 at modified details on 7900GT, but there are still times when frame rates drop into the single digits.Yawgm0th - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
No, they're not. I mean, you can do tweaks that involve lowering settings, but that are tons you can do that improve graphics and graphics performance at the same time.JarredWalton - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - link
For example? I'd really like to get more graphics quality for less graphics work.kmmatney - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
I would also like to see the performance without Bloom and HDR. A lot of times, I prefer games without this effect (its often not implemented very well). PLays well on my setup without AA and bloom, and with AF, at 1280 x 1024. Sempron 2800+ @ 2.4 GHz, and modded X800GTO2 running at X850XT speeds. I'd rather play at the higher resolution than lower resolution + Bloom.OrSin - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
My problem is half the hipe of this game is that you a need a monster system to use it.Does any one remeber when a game bragged about the fast that it doesn't need powerful card to play it. Now its just the opposite. No wonder game will not be made for hard core gamers soon. I just can't understand have to pay $400 for a card that only 1-2 games will actually need. When in 6 months that same card is $250 maybe 6 games out might need it. Program in this age are jsut lazy or the products are being rushed. Can we get some optization and have people talk about great graphics on $150 cards.
As much as I hate consoles I'm leaning to them more and more. They will always the play the game good and mulitplayer support internet support is here (not this game).
I just hate the UI of most of them.