The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion GPU Performance
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 26, 2006 1:07 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Our Settings
We tested at two major settings, one we defined as High Quality and the other we called Medium Quality. The settings were as follows:
| Oblivion Performance Settings | High Quality | Medium Quality |
| Resolution | 1280x1024 | 1024x768 |
| Texture Size | Large | Medium |
| Tree Fade | 50% | 25% |
| Actor Fade | 65% | 50% |
| Item Fade | 65% | 50% |
| Object Fade | 65% | 50% |
| Grass Distance | 50% | 25% |
| View Distance | 100% | 100% |
| Distant Land | On | On |
| Distant Buildings | On | On |
| Distant Trees | On | Off |
| Interior Shadows | 50% | 30% |
| Exterior Shadows | 50% | 30% |
| Self Shadows | On | Off |
| Shadows on Grass | On | Off |
| Tree Canopy Shadows | On | Off |
| Shadow Filtering | High | Low |
| Specular Distance | 50% | 50% |
| HDR Lighting | On | On |
| Bloom Lighting | Off | Off |
| Water Detail | High | Normal |
| Water Reflections | On | On |
| Water Ripples | On | On |
| Window Reflections | On | On |
| Blood Decals | High | Low |
| Anti-aliasing | Off | Off |
Note that when we talk about a setting being 65% we mean that the slider is moved 65% of the way to the right. As you can see from the table above, our High Quality settings aren't as extreme as they could be and the Medium Quality settings are more suited for upper mid-range cards. Since we were dealing with such a wide spread of GPUs we had to err on the side of being more stressful in our visual settings, especially in the mid-range, in order to adequately characterize the performance of all of the GPUs. We didn't want to end up with a graph where everything performed the same because we were too lax with our detail settings.
At the end of the day, these two configurations are what we would strive for in order to get good performance while maintaining a good gameplay experience.
High End Settings
Mid Range Settings
Note that the ATI Radeon X850/X800 series of GPUs don't support Shader Model 3.0, which is required for HDR in Oblivion. Thus we had to leave the X850/X800 out of our default tests with HDR enabled and ran a second set of configurations with HDR disabled and Bloom enabled.
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MrCoyote - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
What good does it do to benchmark this game? The engine they licensed for this game is very limited in performance and unoptimized <b>(GameByro)</b>. Please wait until a patch comes out, then benchmark the game. This performance limit can be seen in various reviews across the web. A 7900GT or X1900XT should be getting more than 20-30FPS on this game.munky - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
People are not gonna wait for a patch to buy the game, and the whole premise of improved performance with a patch is uncertain. This review is useful for those who have the game, and would like to know if a certain upgrade would give them a significant improvement, or would just like to see how their performance compares to those with other video cards.Jackyl - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
That's very true that the game is very much in an "unfinished" stage and was released too soon. Any professional developer knows that the Gamebyro engine has it's share of performance problems. It is not in the same league of engines as others. Why they licensed this engine is beyond me.Warning...Don't post anything even remotely negative about the game on the official forums. Fanboys will be waiting to lash back at you. Yet people are complaining left and right on the forums of the performance problems, bugs, and interface problems. The PC game looks nothing but just a console port. Bad inventory screen system and GUI. Hopefully a 3rd party modder can change these things.
poohbear - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
the bad inventory has already been resolved w/ a user mod. look for the Btmod-2.20nts - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
The X1800XT can be had for less than the 7900GT and performs better...Why was it not include it in the Mid Range graphs?
SiliconDoc - Friday, July 17, 2009 - link
Wow, how quickly the complaining masses forget. $1,200.00 for two ati cards - LOLAnd here I've been told by all the disgruntled red fans that nvidia is the greedy scalping horror....
BWHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
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It's so nice that anandtech doesn't delete their old reviews.
TWELVE HUNDRED BUCKAROOS FOR 2 ATI CARDS.
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Once again I find out the red fans have been deceiving me all along.
This is great - another myth of the web, exploded thanks to the web.
Spoelie - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
So very truehttp://www.alternate.de/html/productDetails.html?a...">http://www.alternate.de/html/productDetails.html?a...
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For the money, the x1800xt 512mb seems a better deal.
bob661 - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - link
Just checked on Newegg and the prices are the same unless you go with the 256MB version of the X1800XT.bob661 - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - link
On Zipzoomfly, the 7900GT is a bit cheaper.Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
We inadvertently left it out of the midrange tests; I just updated the graphs and conclusion to reflect its inclusion.Take care,
Anand