Introducing the Radeon X1650 XT: A New Mainstream GPU from ATI
by Josh Venning on October 30, 2006 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Performance
Many times we preface our tests with comments about the game we are testing, and Oblivion just happens to be one that we can't say enough good things about. There still isn't much out there in the way of competition to this game just in terms of graphical intensity, but we would also say it's one of the richest, most beautiful, and most involving RPGs we've ever played for the PC.
Because the terrain is so varied, we came up with a few different benchmarks within the game to test different environments. Much of the gameplay is spent in caves and dark ruins so this was one of the tests. Another test was in a snowy village outside with a few NPCs around. The last test was out in the wilderness at night, surrounded by a few fireball-shooting enemies, and walking towards an impressive Oblivion gate, which makes use of a lot of the game's lighting and fire effects. This last test is the most demanding on our graphics cards, so this was the benchmark we've chosen to include for these performance tests.
Oblivion thankfully allows extensive control over the graphics quality settings in the game, and most users will find it necessary to tweak these settings to some degree to find the best setting for their system. These are the quality settings we used for these tests.
With the settings turned up to their highest, the game is truly breathtaking, and conversely, if certain key settings are turned down to their lowest (for example, view distance), the game loses much in the way of aesthetics, and more importantly loses a lot of enjoyable gameplay. For this reason, we don't really recommend trying to play this game if your graphics card is at all low-end.
While playing this game, the FPS has a tendency to sometimes slow down a lot. For instance, when you come near an Oblivion gate and suddenly several scamps spawn out of it and start attacking you, the potential for a frame rate drop is very high. Generally though, an average frame rate of about 20 or higher in our test is good enough to enjoy the game; any lower than this would be risky and probably would take away from the gameplay. While it isn't generally a very fast-paced game (a twitch-shooter it isn't) there are times when you need to act fast, and choppy frame rates will definitely hinder this.
We can see here first off how graphically intense this game is compared to the previous two. This particular benchmark is so demanding that only the most powerful graphics cards could hope to run it at 1600x1200 and up (with high quality settings). With Oblivion, we would generally recommend playing it at a lower resolution with the quality settings as high as possible, as this way the game still looks very good.
An interesting thing about Oblivion is that it favors ATI hardware over NVIDIA, and this is evident here when we look at the X1650 XT compared with the 7600 GT. In this case, the X1650 XT has a small but significant performance lead over the 7600 GT. Because of this, the X1650 XT is more likely to be playable at 1024x768 than the 7600 GT. This is one case where the X1650 XT clearly beats the 7600 GT just in terms of performance. Oblivion players may want to consider this card once it's available, but only assuming the price is reasonable.
Many times we preface our tests with comments about the game we are testing, and Oblivion just happens to be one that we can't say enough good things about. There still isn't much out there in the way of competition to this game just in terms of graphical intensity, but we would also say it's one of the richest, most beautiful, and most involving RPGs we've ever played for the PC.
Because the terrain is so varied, we came up with a few different benchmarks within the game to test different environments. Much of the gameplay is spent in caves and dark ruins so this was one of the tests. Another test was in a snowy village outside with a few NPCs around. The last test was out in the wilderness at night, surrounded by a few fireball-shooting enemies, and walking towards an impressive Oblivion gate, which makes use of a lot of the game's lighting and fire effects. This last test is the most demanding on our graphics cards, so this was the benchmark we've chosen to include for these performance tests.
Oblivion thankfully allows extensive control over the graphics quality settings in the game, and most users will find it necessary to tweak these settings to some degree to find the best setting for their system. These are the quality settings we used for these tests.
| Oblivion Performance Settings | |
| Texture Size | Large |
| Tree Fade | 100% |
| Actor Fade | 100% |
| Item Fade | 66% |
| Object Fade | 90% |
| Grass Distance | 50% |
| View Distance | 100% |
| Distant Land | On |
| Distant Buildings | On |
| Distant Trees | On |
| Interior Shadows | 95% |
| Exterior Shadows | 85% |
| Self Shadows | On |
| Shadows on Grass | On |
| Tree Canopy Shadows | On |
| Shadow Filtering | High |
| Specular Distance | 100% |
| HDR Lighting | On |
| Bloom Lighting | Off |
| Water Detail | High |
| Water Reflections | On |
| Water Ripples | On |
| Window Reflections | On |
| Blood Decals | High |
| Anti-aliasing | Off |
With the settings turned up to their highest, the game is truly breathtaking, and conversely, if certain key settings are turned down to their lowest (for example, view distance), the game loses much in the way of aesthetics, and more importantly loses a lot of enjoyable gameplay. For this reason, we don't really recommend trying to play this game if your graphics card is at all low-end.
While playing this game, the FPS has a tendency to sometimes slow down a lot. For instance, when you come near an Oblivion gate and suddenly several scamps spawn out of it and start attacking you, the potential for a frame rate drop is very high. Generally though, an average frame rate of about 20 or higher in our test is good enough to enjoy the game; any lower than this would be risky and probably would take away from the gameplay. While it isn't generally a very fast-paced game (a twitch-shooter it isn't) there are times when you need to act fast, and choppy frame rates will definitely hinder this.
We can see here first off how graphically intense this game is compared to the previous two. This particular benchmark is so demanding that only the most powerful graphics cards could hope to run it at 1600x1200 and up (with high quality settings). With Oblivion, we would generally recommend playing it at a lower resolution with the quality settings as high as possible, as this way the game still looks very good.
An interesting thing about Oblivion is that it favors ATI hardware over NVIDIA, and this is evident here when we look at the X1650 XT compared with the 7600 GT. In this case, the X1650 XT has a small but significant performance lead over the 7600 GT. Because of this, the X1650 XT is more likely to be playable at 1024x768 than the 7600 GT. This is one case where the X1650 XT clearly beats the 7600 GT just in terms of performance. Oblivion players may want to consider this card once it's available, but only assuming the price is reasonable.
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LuxFestinus - Monday, October 30, 2006 - link
One nice thing about the X1650 XT is that is doesn't require an external power connection. The second "is" should be "it" please. Thank you.Josh Venning - Monday, October 30, 2006 - link
It's been fixed. Thankstrabpukcip - Monday, October 30, 2006 - link
I think they meant the 7600GT doesn't require an external power connector.
I sure remember hooking up the power connector for my little brother's 7900GS less than five metres from me, being derived from a crippled 7900GT and all.
And as for you you American dotted underline spellchecker. I spell it metres NOT meters where I come from ;). (It even underlined "spellchecker", the irony).
bldckstark - Monday, October 30, 2006 - link
What colour was the underline?DerekWilson - Monday, October 30, 2006 - link
lolJarredWalton - Monday, October 30, 2006 - link
Back to the original comment, this has been corrected. Unless Josh knows something I don't, all of the 7900 GS cards I can find require a PCIe power connector. 7600 GT does not, however. Odd, considering power draws are about the same.BigLan - Monday, October 30, 2006 - link
What's the avivo performance of the x1650xt? Can it handle acceleration of 1080i/p stuff, or is it limited to 720p like it's predecessor? If it can only do 720p it's taking a huge hit against the 7600gt which has full purevideo compatibility (and is the current darling of the htpc crowd.)Also, I haven't heard anything about gpu accelerated transcoding in a while. Any chance of getting an anandtech article about it using non-beta versions?
blckgrffn - Monday, October 30, 2006 - link
An incomplete specifications table, assertions like "it has twice the pixel pipelines, 12 to 24 which will fix the performance issues" when really the x16xx family was plagued by a fill rate comparable to a 9600XT.Don't take this personal Josh - but Anandtech is supposed to have the definitive review, not simply an adequate one.
Nat
DerekWilson - Monday, October 30, 2006 - link
We had trouble tracking down the # of vertex and color/z pipes -- we didn't want to comment on any fill rate differences until we could confirm our suspicions -- raster pipes have doubled, and this definitely helps at higher resolutions and with AA or stencil shadows, etc...But doubling the pixel pipes does allow them to get a big boost in performance without upping the clock speed in more modern games (like oblivion) where fill rate wasnt as large an issue.
Sorry for the gap in the article -- it has been updated and a paragraph has been added after our charts to explain the impact of raster pipes. In the future, we'll be sure to get ahold of the data we need in a more timely fashion.
Derek Wilson
blckgrffn - Tuesday, October 31, 2006 - link
Thanks!Anandtech is my homepage, and will continue to be for some time. Really, I think we all just want to see this site be the best that it can be.
Nat