The Elder Scrolls IV: OblivionThe Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, or simply Oblivion, is a single player fantasy-themed action-oriented computer role-playing game developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks/ZeniMax Media and the Take-Two Interactive subsidiary 2K Games.
Oblivion's story focuses on a former prisoner drawn into a Daedric Lord's plan to invade the mortal realm of Tamriel. Gates to the hellish realm of Oblivion are opened, through which many daedra flow. The game continues the open-ended tradition of previous Elder Scrolls games, allowing the player to travel anywhere in the game world at any time, including the option to ignore or postpone the main storyline indefinitely.
When Oblivion was released in spring 2006 we had found a new system benchmark, the expansive gameworld of Oblivion required a hefty configuration if you wanted to play it at the highest detail level. Not only did it tax the video card, the CPU was quite important too.
Oblivion was once able to bring any system to its knees, in our tests neither graphics card goes below 60 FPS, even with 16xAA enabled. The HD 4870 X2 has a comfortable lead over the GTX.
The performance of Oblivion under XP is pretty much on par with the numbers under Vista; NVIDA gains ~4% overall, ATI loses less than half a percent.
For a detail view of the results, with AA scaling and XP -> Vista Scaling see
this table
...8xAA on ATI should be compared to 8xQAA on nV, not the 8xAA which is 4xMSAA based CSAA mode
...16xAA on ATI effectively turn the card into single chip card which can do 16xMSAA, since both chips render the same frame with different AA patterns
...16xAA on nV is 4xMSAA based CSAA mode and 16xQAA on nV is 8xMSAA based CSAA mode
So 16x and 8x comparisons in your graphs are far from being 'fair' or 'apples-to-apples', the 8xAA should have ATI 8xAA vs nV 8xQAA (8xQAA = 8xMSAA) and 16xAA shouldn't even exist since the GTX280 can't do 16xMSAA which is (practicly) what the HD4870X2 is doing by blending the same frame rendered twice with different AA patterns.