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. We found memory size and memory speed to be an important factor in this game, both DDR2/DDR3 cards have 256Mb and handled 1024x768 resolution quite well. We set in-game details to medium settings with AA/AF disabled.



A manual walkthrough outside was repeated several times and the results averaged. Minimum FPS are included in the charts as these will give you an idea if you’ll see noticeable FPS drops in game or not.



The 3DMark benchmarks showed a ~40% performance gap between the DDR2<>DDR3 8500 GT cards at default speed, in Oblivion this difference is bigger still, 58%! Overclocked the game runs at 70fps on average with min. FPS never going below 50, very impressive!

Colin McRae DIRT

The Colin McRae series has always been on the edge of technology, pushing graphics cards and CPUs to deliver astonishing graphics, the latest incarnation called DIRT takes racing games to the next level GFX wise. It’s stressful enough to bring high end cards to a grinding halt; we had to drop resolution and in-game detail in order to get playable frame rates. Surprisingly the game remains quite enjoyable even at these low IQ settings.



We could run at the game at low detail but had to restrict the maximum resolution to 1024x768, no AA/AF



Again we see the impact of the increased clock speeds on the Leadtek 8500 GT model, the Shader clocks make a noticeable impact here too, at default speed the game is playable at ~30FPS, the 8500 GT DDR2 can’t keep up. Overclocked both cards offer higher frame rates, the Leadtek 40% more so!

Onto our newest game benchmark, BioShock ->