High End GPU Performance w/ HDR Enabled

The white lines within the bars indicate minimum frame rate

At the very high end, in our most strenuous benchmark, $1200 of graphics cards will buy you less than 50 fps on average. It doesn't actually matter which vendor you go with, both ATI and NVIDIA offer similar performance at the very high end with one very important exception: ATI seems to offer much higher minimum frame rates than NVIDIA at the very high end in this test. We tried adjusting the render ahead setting but couldn't improve the situation any for NVIDIA, so while both ATI and NVIDIA's best performers offer similar average frame rates, the ATI Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire setup is better overall thanks to higher minimum frame rates.

Looking at single card performance, once again ATI takes the crown as the Radeon X1900 XTX has higher average and minimum frame rates than the GeForce 7900 GTX.

What really puts things into perspective though is the performance of the GeForce 7800 GTX, a GPU that was at one point a $500 king of the hill now falls in the lower half of the graph. Unable to average more than 20 fps in this test, the settings we're running at here are too much for the GPU. Given that we haven't turned up every feature and are running at a relatively mainstream 1280 x 1024 resolution, this chart alone gives you good indication of exactly how stressful Oblivion actually is.

GeForce 6 owners should no longer consider their GPUs as high end, because Oblivion certainly doesn't. Even a pair of GeForce 6800 GSes can't break 15 fps in this test and with a minimum frame rate of 10 fps, they make the game far from playable at these settings. No, believe it or not, but the GeForce 6800 GS performs like a mid-range card at best under Oblivion.

The white lines within the bars indicate minimum frame rate

At our high quality 1280 x 1024 setting, virtually all of the cards offer nearly identical performance when walking around inside a town, even down to the minimum frame rates. The problem with these numbers is that you really can't determine what settings you'll be running Oblivion at based on your in-town or in-dungeon performance, because the moment you step outside you'll find yourself watching a slide show. It's also worth noting that although a lot of these cards have average frame rates in the 50s, their minimums all drop to right around 30 fps. If we crank up any of the detail settings we'll be looking at even worse minimum frame rates, which are just as important.

We see no benefit to SLI or CrossFire here, due to whatever limitation we're running into at these settings. What we will investigate in future articles is exactly what is causing this limitation; we would assume we're CPU limitated even though we're already running an Athlon 64 FX-60. That doesn't bode well for other processors, as there simply isn't much more we can throw at the game.

It isn't until we get below the GeForce 7800 GTX that performance begins to drop off for our contenders here and once you get slower than the X1800 GTO then the minimum frame rates begin to dip below 30fps.

The white lines within the bars indicate minimum frame rate

Like our Town test, our Dungeon benchmark shows the cream of the crop performing very similarly with performance only really dropping off below the 7800 GTX. Although our Dungeon test also runs into some sort of a performance limiter, it appears to be a different one than what we saw outside walking around the town because our average limited frame rate is now up around 80 fps instead of 50 fps.

What the combination of these three tests show is the full gamut of performance of these GPUs under Oblivion, from the worst conditions to the best conditions. And while everyone is fairly competitive indoors or walking around a town, once you journey beyond the town walls you can really start to appreciate a faster video card.