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Low to Mid-Range PCIe Video Card Roundup

Videocards/VGA Reviews by piotke @ 2006-05-19

In this roundup we compare seven different video cards which don?t cost you an arm and a leg. Using FRAPS and several popular games we test the performance and try to find the best value for your money. Want to play the latest games with a budget friendly graphics card? Read on to find out which one to pick.

Oblivion

Oblivion
Official Website

Oblivion is the sequel to the popular role playing game Morrowind. The graphics engine has been completely revamped and makes it one of the best looking games out there at the moment, if your hardware is up to the task. This game is very taxing on both your CPU as well as your graphics card, only with extremely high end hardware (SLI/Crossfire high end card) you can play the game at high quality settings and detail at higher resolutions.

The outdoor scenes are most taxing and that’s where I’ll compare to the performance, I descend a hill next to the water, killing a wolf and a creepy looking crab.

Hit Play-Button to see the manual runthrough.

I only tested at 1024x768, because even at this resolution the performance is less than stellar, if you want to have a good balance of game immersion and playable frame rates you’ll have to play around a bit with the graphics settings in-game. I set the viewing distance quite high because otherwise you’ll be staring into grey smoke most of the time. This does put a lot of extra strain on the graphics card and will the game more sluggish.

While the game is played from a first person perspective and battles are done in real time (not turn based as some other RPG’s) the FPS doesn’t have to be 60FPS to make the game playable. Even at 20-30FPS the game is quite enjoyable.

Head to Head

The first test is with Bloom enabled, all cards support this rendering mode, and it’s the ideal choice for the less powerful systems out there. Lighting is not as spectacular compared to HDR, but you get a boost in FPS.

Madshrimps (c)

The X1300 Pro is really struggling to no surprise, while the other cards make a good showing, the X1600XT does better here than it did in Call of Duty 2 and is ahead of the 6600GT and X800GTO. The X1800GTO is again trailing the 7600GT, will this be a trend?

Enabling HDR was possible on all cards except the X800GTO which doesn’t support Smart Shader 3.0, which is required for HDR in Oblivion.

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The 7600GT holds up quite well, while the other cards show a ~10FPS dip.

Squiggly lines chart

While the X1800GTO is a generation ahead of the 6600GT, it doesn’t seem to outrun the low-end cards by much:

Madshrimps (c)

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