The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Performance

Oblivion is quite a bit more variable than our other tests, and we like to give our numbers closer to a 5% margin of error here. This is important to remember as our overclocked EVGA 8800 GTX and the new 8800 Ultra trade places a couple times in our testing. To us, this says that the cards have roughly the same performance.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion




In fact, because our numbers were so close, we decided to take a look at performance with 16xAF and 4xAA enabled this time around as well. Again, we see about a 10% improvement from the stock 8800 GTX to the 8800 Ultra, and our EVGA card falls just on the margin of error border with the 8800 Ultra at the high end.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion




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  • strikeback03 - Thursday, May 3, 2007 - link

    Since you always seem to think good graphics cards are for shooting aliens, are you aware that there are cards that sell for over $5000 for business applications?
  • gigahertz20 - Wednesday, May 2, 2007 - link

    Well I was excited when I woke up this morning to find reviews on the 8800 Ultra but after reading this I'm very disappointed. All Nvidia did was overclock a 8800 GTX and are now calling it a 8800 Ultra while trying to sell it for $200-$300 more. It performs a few percent better but not enough to be noticeable in a game.

    I guess they decided a few people would buy it and it's not like Nvidia is losing money making them, the 8800 Ultras are the same as the 8800GTX just factory clocked a little higher. I guess as a business move it makes sense, make a little extra money while not having to change your product around at all except for a clock increase.

    8800GTS 320MB is still the best deal, come on AMD/ATI I hope their benchmarks for the R600 won't be as disappointing as this, what I've seen from DailyTech on the R600 it looks like Nvidia could be holding the crown for quite some time.
  • Zefram0911 - Wednesday, May 2, 2007 - link

    guess what though... there are still going to be people who buy two of theses bad boys for Sli...... my goodness.
  • DigitalFreak - Wednesday, May 2, 2007 - link

    Yeah, well... "A fool and his money are soon parted".
  • johnsonx - Wednesday, May 2, 2007 - link

    Foxconn's 8800GTX OC runs at 630/2000 and is only $550 at NewEgg:

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...

    This new GeForce 8800 Ultra really seems pointless, when almost identical performance can be had for $550. It just doesn't seem Ultra enough for an extra $300.
  • DigitalFreak - Wednesday, May 2, 2007 - link

    No kidding. Nearly $300 less than the 8800 Ultra. No wonder Nvidia wasn't too keen on letting their board partners overclock the 8800 GTX....
  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 2, 2007 - link

    I'll make a note of this in the article, as the Foxconn should perform equal to the EVGA card.
  • Sunrise089 - Thursday, May 3, 2007 - link

    Theres also a similar spec'd BFG card at a lower price than the quoted eVGA. I'm all for reccomending eVGA in a buyers guide, but this article actually appears biased by leaving out other (cheaper) cards in favor of a single eVGA.
  • munky - Wednesday, May 2, 2007 - link

    Nice job on the review, including an overclocked gtx really shows just what a joke the 8800u is. However, I suggest that in your future articles you keep the colors consistent between the cards in your resolution scaling graph. It's confusing if a card is shown in yellow on one graph, and then the same card is blue in the next graph.
  • DerekWilson - Thursday, May 3, 2007 - link

    sorry, it ended up that way because we had trouble enabling 4xAA on r6v with the ati x1950xtx. excel automatically picked the colors -- everything else is consistent though.

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