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.

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.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion


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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