High End GPU Performance w/ Bloom Enabled
The only Shader Model 2.0 cards we have in this comparison are ATI's Radeon X800 series, the rest of the contenders are SM3.0 capable. While the SM2.0 vs. 3.0 distinction doesn't really exist in Oblivion, there is one feature that requires the later spec: lighting. Oblivion's HDR lighting setting requires a Shader Model 3.0 capable card, otherwise you're left with a less precise lighting solution called Bloom or nothing at all. Bloom naturally runs faster on all GPUs so we couldn't really throw the X800 numbers in with the rest of the HDR capable cards from above, instead we were forced to do a second run of our benchmarks with Bloom enabled on all GPUs to show you X800 owners whether or not it made sense to upgrade just to get a higher frame rate.
We left the multi-GPU solutions out of these graphs to save time and make them easier to digest; you've already seen how having multiple GPUs improves performance in these tests, so the focus here will be on the single card upgrade paths available to X800 and X850 series owners.
The white lines within the bars indicate minimum frame rate
ATI's X850 and X800 series performs quite well despite its age, with even the X800 GTO outpacing the GeForce 6800 GS. Unfortunately, if you want a good upgrade from your X850/X800 card you're going to have to set your sights (and budget) fairly high. The GeForce 7900 GT and Radeon X1800 GTO are probably your best bets for upgrades, but if you have an X850 XT or X800 XT don't expect the performance difference to be tremendous; instead, you'll have to look towards the Radeon X1900 series.
We continue to see this trend of NVIDIA GPUs posting lower minimum frame rates than ATI GPUs here which, unfortunately for NVIDIA, makes us strongly recommend choosing ATI instead.
The white lines within the bars indicate minimum frame rate
Performance in our Town benchmarks is pretty much as expected and as we've seen before; the very high end GPUs all hit a performance wall right around 50 fps. The Radeon X800 series starts to pull up the rear but still offers significantly better performance than NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 GS (which is a performance equivalent to the GeForce 6800 GT/Ultra depending on clock speeds).
The white lines within the bars indicate minimum frame rate
While all of the GPUs have similar minimum frame rates in our Dungeon test, there is a pretty clear breakdown of performance once we look at cards slower than the GeForce 7800 GT. The standings however don't really change from what we've already seen, the X850/X800 cards continue to significantly outperform the GeForce 6800 GS while making any upgrade path that yields a reasonable improvement fairly expensive.
How come the both the vanilla 6800 and the 6600GT outperform the 6800GS? It hing the resutls for these cards were somehow entered wrongly while making the performance graphics...
Personally I think I will wait until the new video cards come out before I purchase anything specifically for this game. Why pay the $300-$400 on a new card that performs alright when there should be new ones out near the end of the year that will perform way better. Not to mention drivers that are in the works just for this game and the patches that are coming out. My x600 is playable, so I'm satisfied.
I guess if you really need that cutting edge performance then you won't mind spending the $1200 or more to buy SLI or Crossfire video cards. This is probably the same peopel who upgrade their desktops every 6 months because there is something else better available. However for the rest of us we should probably wait until the game has 6 months of patches and new video drivers before deciding on upgrading. Experience with HL2 and almost every other game tells me that performance will get better with time.
Other
the worst part is that the grass is quite frankly FUGLY! complete sticks out like a sore thumb in every scene i tried it in.
in any case. i'm running a 2.4@3.2 northwood/1gig/6800gt@ultra+/1280x1024,hdr,nograss,noshadows and it plays very nicely for me.
i would suspect that anyone with anything from the 7800+ & x1800+ families would be extremely happy with the game if they took off the grass and toned down the shadows.
Of course, the grass isn't perfect. It doesn't bend around your character's feet/legs; when an object like heavy armor, a sword, a dead body, etc. falls down in tall grass, it can also make it a bit tricky to find. I do find myself disabling the grass at times just for that reason, not to mention shutting it off when there's too much going on and frame rates have slowed to a crawl. Every time I turn off the grass, though, it seems like I've started to turn Oblivion into Morrowind.
Obviously, we're still at the stage where game engines are only giving a very rough approximation of reality. We won't even discuss how the shadowing/shading/texturing on some faces and objects can look downright awful. We're at the point now where every increase in graphical realism requires an exponential increase in time by the programmers, artists, modelers, etc. as well as an exponential increase in computational power required to render the scenes.
We know all the x1k Radeons best any nvidia card out there now in this game because of the simple fact that SM3.0 was done better on ATI and because of the massive pixel shading power the x1900 cards have.
I don't see any AA tests as well. You forgot to mention that the game looks like garbage without AA and I know many nvidia users that prefer bloom+AA than just HDR.
Thanks for wasting my time.
The most important tests are by far the Oblivion gate areas, and trust me you will be seen plenty of them in real gameplay. Who cares if you get 70 frames per second or what ever in the dungeon if your frame rates dropped to 20 or lower outside? Looking at those figures, the XTX comes out about 3% faster, which is pretty much what you can expect from the clock speed increase. 625/1450 vs. 650/1550... if we're GPU limited (as opposed to bandwidth limited, which appears to be the case with all Bolivian), the XTX has a whopping 4% clock speed advantage. Throw in CPU and system limitations, and you're not going to be able to tell the difference between the XT and the XTX in actual use.
As for your assertion that the game looks like garbage without anti-aliasing, I strongly disagree, as I'm sure many others do. Just because you think AA is required doesn't mean everyone feels the same. I would take HDR rendering in a heartbeat over AA in this game. That's how I've been playing the game for well over 100 hours. When running at the native panel resolution of my LCD (1920x1200), anti-aliasing is something I worry about only when everything else is maxed out. My point isn't that you're wrong, but merely that you're wrong for saying that many people prefer bloom + anti-aliasing. *Some* people will prefer that, but far more likely is that people will prefer bloom without anti-aliasing over HDR, simply because it gives you higher frame rates.
Also we aren't told what settings were used in the drivers for each video card. That plays a huge role here.
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