The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion GPU Performance
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 26, 2006 1:07 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
Looking at the performance offered by a variety of GPUs in Oblivion makes one thing clear: this game is the most stressful title on the market right now. We've focused primarily on stock performance using commonly available settings, but if you're serious about getting the most out of Oblivion we highly recommend looking at some of the tweak guides to help balance performance with appearance. For now, those of you hoping to run Oblivion at 1920x1200 with all the detail settings at maximum will need to wait for future GPU generations. But how do the current generation of cards fare?
At the high end, there's no better solution than ATI's Radeon X1900 series. While NVIDIA can offer similar performance with the GeForce 7900 GTX, its minimum frame rates aren't anywhere near as high as what ATI can deliver, meaning that the X1900 series will give you a much better overall experience. Oblivion is quite possibly the first game we've ever benchmarked where having multiple GPUs is almost necessary to get good frame rates at relatively common resolutions with most of the impressive visual effects turned on. The performance offered by a pair of X1900 XTs simply can't be matched by any single card, but as good of a game as Oblivion is you'd have to have a pretty serious computer budget to accommodate the $1200 that a pair of X1900 CrossFire GPUs will set you back.
Looking at mid range offerings, our recommendation sticks with ATI as the Radeon X1800 XT continues ATI's trend of offering absolutely stellar performance (relatively speaking) under Oblivion. At $200, the GeForce 7600 GT also proved to be a fairly strong contender in our medium quality tests.
In terms of upgrades, if you've got a CrossFire or SLI motherboard, adding a second GPU can improve performance by 25-50% in our Oblivion Gate test. X1600 CrossFire is probably the cheapest upgrade offering reasonable, assuming you already own an Radeon X1600 XT. At around $150 you really can't go wrong there. Moving from a single 6800 GS or 7600 GT to SLI also provides nearly 50% more performance, but the cost will be a bit higher.
If you own a slightly older card like something in the Radeon X800/X850 series, you honestly don't really need an upgrade to get better performance under Oblivion. Moving to a Shader Model 3.0 card like something in ATI's Radeon X1800 or X1900 series will give you HDR support and you'll be able to turn up some more eye candy, but then you're talking about a fairly significant upgrade investment. Moving to an X1800 XT will set you back more than $300 and still not offer you tremendous performance at higher image quality settings; for that you'll have to turn to a X1900 XT or XTX. Owners of the GeForce 6 series are in a similar situation: lowering your expectations a bit may be better than spending a lot of money on an upgrade.
This is just the tip of the iceberg however; we have a general idea of what GPUs do the best and worst in Oblivion but what about CPUs? And at what point does it stop making sense to spend money on new graphics cards versus just going out and buying the Xbox 360 version instead? We'll be answering those questions and more as our Oblivion coverage continues...
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blackbrrd - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
Using the BTmod myself, it works for me ;)I would like a few more shortcut keys myself, but other than that, it took me about 2 minutes to figure out how to use the interface. The 8 free shortkeys that you can assign to weapons/spells/potions etc works well, you just want more shortkeys :P
I am playing the game on a laptop with a radeon 9600. It obviosly doesn't look as good as in the pictures, but it runs ok, so I would say that the graphics engine scales nicely for any graphics card bought the last 2-3 years*
*A friend of mine has a geforce fx5900 and he gets horrible performance - there should have been a seperate shader 1.x path for those cards.
I do agree that the game is just nearly finished, for instance the textures for 256mb and 512mb graphics cards could be much larger, there are several mods available as it is, but it should have been in the game.
All in all I think it was a good compromise between launching the game as early as possible and performance wise. Personally I haven't had any problems with the game except for multitasking which won't work properly if you don't pull down the console first :P **
**The game has quirks - but its a good game, and there are work arounds. :) Its also the first game that have made me actually consider upgradeing/buying a proper gameing machine.
kmmatney - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
There is a shader 1.X path - look up Oldblivion. it allows the game to run on the 5900 quite well, from what I've heard.Ryan Norton - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
the elderscrolls.com/forums do crack me the fuck up... there is literally no aspect of the game no matter how glaringly mis-implemented that the fanboys will not defend to their last gasp.I don't have a link for it, but the website/guy that does "tweak guides" for 3D games put up a super-lengthy one for Oblivion. I'd already stumbled onto some of the things but it was still good for making the game seem a little smoother outdoors.
I love the line about outdoors performance making users contemplate $1200 on video cards... until I started playing Obliv I'd always thought SLI a waste of money, but now I catch myself thinking "hmm another 7800GTX is 'only' another $450"... must restrain self.
Powermoloch - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
I had been waiting for quite a while for anandtech's take on oblivion. And I'm very surprised that you got alot of GPUs tested out for us. Especially being a x850xt agp owner, I'm very pleased that it has enough juice to play @ 1280x1024 at almost @ med-high settings lol.Kudos for the great job guys, great benchmark results ;).
Frallan - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - link
I agree!!!Excelent Reveiw!!!
But as an owner of older Hardware Id love to know where my 6800Gt stumbles in on the list. Usually I run it @ 425/1150 which is almost Ultra speeds but....
Please any1 who is in the know???
bob661 - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - link
You can compare it to the 6800GS. They're the same card.michal1980 - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
playing the xbox 360 version.and really, it does not look much better then like hlf2.
I'm sorry but anyone that says (not that anyone here has) that this is a great engine with great graphics needs to take a break.
there can be alot going on sometimes, but the draw distance sucks, loads every 2 mins. controls are a little wishy washy.
its an ok game, but at times seems way to unfocused. with a story line that is weak at best.
Jackyl - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
Correct. The graphics are not "next gen" as was hyped. The problem with the performance of the gamebryo engine is that it doesn't support culling, hidden-surface removal. It draws everything, which causes a lot of slow down. If you are outside, standing behind a building, it still calculates whatever is on the other side, even though you can't see it. Bad design IMO for a "next gen" engine.JarredWalton - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
Okay, I'm not going to dispute your claims, but how on earth do you know that the engine isn't doing HSR? Damn, that was one of the first things that was discussed in terms of 3D engine optimization in my Graphics class. I'm not sure how you prove what they are or aren't doing without seeing the code, though.I also have to say that I don't think the Gamebryo engine is as bad as you're making it out to be. I see very little in the way of load times (the "loading" screens are mostly there for Xbox360), large outdoor areas, relatively nice effects (HDR, reflections, etc.), and generally interesting gameplay mechanics. You're certainly not going to get all of these things from other engines on the market. Doom3 would choke outdoors, for example.
What we need is an engine that offers:
Doom3 indoor areas
Far Cry outdoors
HL2/FEAR shaders
Dungeon Siege load times
Any UI that doesn't have console roots! UGH! Sell... Are you sure? Buy... Are you sure? Heaven forbid that we actually sell more than one type of item at a time. How about something like Fallout's barter interface, with a few tweaks to bring it into 2006 era? Also, what the hell is the point of "maximum gold" for a shop. "I can only buy $500 worth of stuff at a time, but if you sell things to me one at a time, I can effectively buy out your whole inventory!" Thank you Bethesda for dumbing down the economic system. Maybe they should have more magical weapons readily available, and then allow you to trade equipment to get them recharged? Naw, real bartering would make too much sense....
nts - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
Hidden surface removal is obviously there, every game has it lol :pWhat this game needs and is missing is some sort of Occlusion Culling (not sending down geometry that won't be visible in the final frame, eg terrain/trees/grass behind city walls).