We used the latest addition to the impressive Elder Scrolls (Publisher: 2K Games)series of titles, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion with the 1.2 patch applied. It uses the Gamebyro engine and features DirectX 9.0 shaders, the Havok physics engine and Bethesda use SpeedTree for rendering the trees. The world is made up of trees, stunning landscapes, lush grass and features High Dynamic Range (HDR) lighting and soft shadowing. If you want to learn more about The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, we recommend giving our graphics and gameplay review a read.
The graphics options are hugely comprehensive, with four screens of options available for you to tweak to your heart's content. There is also the configuration file too, but we've kept things as simple as possible by leaving that in its out of the box state. For our testing, we used a two minute section walking through a wooded area, down into a valley. This test scenario features lots of vegetation and trees, and is one of the most intense sections we've found in the game -- especially when anti-aliasing is enabled at the same time as HDR.
Aside from the slight drop in performance at 2560x1600, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 either delivered the same or slightly higher performance after installing Windows Vista Service Pack 1.
With anti-aliasing enabled, the GeForce 9800 GX2 suffered from a slight drop in performance compared to the pre-SP1 installation, but because the frame rates were fairly high, there wasn't really anything noteworthy to report - we saw very little difference in performance during real gameplay scenarios. On the other hand, with 0xAA applied, there were slight performance increases and most noteworthy was the increased minimum frame rate at 2560x1600.
Again though, you'd be hard pushed to tell the difference between pre-SP1 and Windows Vista SP1 performance when you're focusing on playing the game.
Author: Tim Smalley
Published: 25th March 2008
To be continued...
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