oh yeah, and it looks teh sexy from my projector on the wall at 1280x1024 :)

I like having the grass. Without the grass, it's just yet another game with a flat, green texture representing the ground. That hasn't been acceptable since 2003. I do think the grass could do with a bit more variation (i.e., taller in some areas, shorter in others, more or less dense, etc.), but if the added variation also increased system demands, then forget it.

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.

I'm not sure what benchmarks you're looking at, but only places where the XT comes out ahead of the XTX are in the city and dungeon benchmarks, and for all intents and purposes the two are tied. Due to the nature of benchmarking with a Bolivian (we're not playing back a recorded demo, but instead wandering through a location in a repeatable manner) the margin of error is going to be higher. The minimum frame rates are particularly prone to variations, as you might just happen to get a hard drive access that causes a frame rate drop in one run but not another.

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.

At least 2 different "benchmarks" where the XT is ahead of the XTX. Once I see crap like this, sort of makes me doubt everything they say.

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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