TES: Oblivion

We start of with an RPG game, The Elder Scrolls : Oblivion has quite a taxing graphics engine, to be able to run it at high resolution and detail levels you need a high end card. Turning down the Quality settings to medium we found gameplay to be doable with these low end cards when resolutions was kept to 1024x768 noAA/AF.



Our first results are with Bloom enabled; it’s not quite HDR (High Dynamic Range) lightening, but it comes close and it’s the next best thing. In the charts below we show minimum and maximum FPS measured with a manual game runthrough, with FRAPS logging the FPS in the background.



Oblivion makes heavy use of shaders for its graphical splendor, the 8500 GT does quite well here compared to the DDR2 equipped 7300 GT which trails behind. The Zotac 7300 GT DDR3 however is able to keep up when all cards are at stock speeds. Once overclocked the 8500 GT increased shader clocks pay off and it takes a very comfortable lead. Overclocking the DDR3 7300 GT has hardly a measurable impact, not quite what we were expecting.

Let’s enable HDR as the average 51FPS of the overclocked 8500 GT is an encouraging result:



As expected, performance drops a bit, but not a whole lot, the overclocked 7300 GT DDR2 matches the stock 8500 GT easily, while the stock 7300 GT DDR3 is on par with it. Once overclocked the 8500 GT takes the lead again, with an impressive average of 46FPS.

Onto our next game ->