In general 95% of this game was just about playable at these settings, with just odd occasions where it became unplayable. General outdoor areas including our Imperial City test seemed to hover around the 40fps mark with a high around 80fps and minimum of 27fps. In other areas of the game the card performed much better, hitting 100fps in indoor areas such as the Rusty Mine test. For the most part in this area it settled around an average of 25fps and was generally playable.īare in mind this game isnt an FPS so super high frame rates arent necessary to enjoy the game. In our Weatherleah test FPS dropped as low as 17fps in places bringing the card to its knees. I ran the game at 1600x1200 everything max, HDR on no AA or AF, the same settings as the Ultra High rig. In single card stakes this is as good as it gets. This is based on an Nforce 4 Motherboard, 4800+ CPU and a single Radeon X1900XTX.
This is the rig I used to play the game from the start for this review. Clearly a multi-GPU system is the ideal setup for those with enough cash wanting to run games at high resolution and detail settings.ĭrivers used were Catalyst 6.3s with the Chuck Patch for enabling crossfire applied. In Imperial City, the average was a good 55fps, with a high of over 100fps and minimum of 40fps, while in the Rusty Mine test it averaged over 100fps, even hitting 180fps momentarily, with a minimum of 80fps. Remember that Weatherleah is a particularly taxing area of the game, and in other places the frame rate soared. Obviously this faired the best and returned the most playable frame rate at high resolution & detail settings out of all the setups.Īt 1600x1200 everything max, the minimum FPS was a reasonable 27fps, with an average of 35fps even tipping the scales towards 47fps in places. This is based on a 4800+ clocked at 2.8ghz (to make an equivalent comparison to single core FX-57) with a ATI Radeon X1900XTX crossfire setup (mastercard was overclocked to match XTX speeds). Just as I was preparing to submit this review, I got notification that a brand spanking new DFI CFX3200-DR motherboard was shipping to me, so I held it for a couple of days to run some crossfire tests with Oblivion. This isnt a graphics card review, so dont expect 10 different cards to be tested in succession, more an investigation into what is needed to make this game playable at reasonable settings. Two Nvidia and two ATI cards were used, all from their most recent range.
I used four different rigs for this purpose, of which the full specs are detailed below. I will also give an indication of general FPS elsewhere in the game for each setup and what I regard to be the best playable settings. how the equivalent rig will perform in the most intense areas. You can take these results as worst case scenarios i.e. This means it is pretty difficult to get an accurate picture of performance across the whole game, or a reliable benchmark. Similarly riding along a road in a lowland area will give you a frame rate somewhere in between the two.
When deep in the woods it is extremely hard on all graphics hardware, while in a cave or mine, or fighting your way through an Oblivion gate you can expect more than double the frame rate. This is probably one of the most intense graphical parts of Oblivion I have come across, and it is important to realise that performance in the game varies widely. All tests were conducted from a place in Cyrodiil called Weatherleah, which provides a particularly tough test with lots of trees flora and fauna to render as well as the odd troll to fight. However I wanted to provide an idea of what you can expect from your rig. These tests arent scientific due to the lack of a repeatable and reliable benchmark. As ever here at Guru3D, we like performance and in particular good performance as well as good looks, so here is a rather subjective idea of performance on a few base systems. And as you may have guessed, you are going to need some seriously hot hardware to run this game at full settings. Tweet All this graphical glory comes at a price though.