The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Oblivion is the continuation of the famous Bethesda Softworks «The Elder Scrolls» role series that includes such games as Arena, Daggerfall and Morrowind. I would say that The Elder Scrolls IV deserves to be called one of the most impatiently awaited projects of the 2006. The game can boast stunning graphics, which is not absolutely impeccable yet: there are a few bugs there. Namely, the level of landscape detail drops down significantly as the player moves away from the objects, although everything looks almost ideal at a shorter distance thanks to the newest 3D graphics engine that uses long pixel shaders but doesn’t involve Shader Model 3.0. This game also owes its great level of detail to powerful middleware generating faces and vegetation.

TES IV: Oblivion is based on a significantly modified and improved Gamebryo 3D engine developed by Emergent Game Technologies. The realistic vegetation is created by SpeedTree engine developed by Interactive Data Visualization. And the faces of all characters are created by a special FaceGen engine. The game is full of complex shader effects and HDR and together with high level of detail and scalability of the Oblivion world it makes the game extremely demanding for the graphics subsystem resources.

We decided not to test our solutions with enabled FSAA, because the HDR support gets disabled even on ATI cards in this case and the graphics quality drops down significantly. Also when HDR is on, Bloom effect cannot be enabled, and vice versa. The current version of ATI Catalyst drivers doesn’t have CrossFire support for TES IV. To enable this feature you have to rename the Oblivion.exe file into AFR-FriendlyD3D.exe, otherwise, no performance boost will occur. Since the game doesn’t have any built-in testing tools, we had to resort to FRAPS. To get a more detailed performance report we tested each card twice: in the open and inside the Imperial City jail tunnel.

In low resolutions you can see that GeForce 7900 GTX is slightly faster than Radeon X1900 XTX, although later on this advantage disappears because of the more efficient ring bus memory controller of the latter. Despite the enormous amount of shaders in the game, Radeon X1900 does not really benefit from 48 pixel processors it has. Unfortunately, we do not know all the peculiarities of the Oblivion graphics engine that is why we cannot tell you with all certainty what slows down the Radeon X1900 XTX: fewer TMUs than by GeForce 7900 GTX or some other factors.

As for the gaming performance, none of the single-card configurations can guarantee 60fps performance rate. In the best case the average performance level is around 45fps, but sometimes the performance can drop below 20fps. Note: Radeon X1900 XTX provides a much higher minimum performance rate than GeForce 7900 GTX. Multi-GPU support enlarges the list of supported resolutions. Moreover, in this case we see the influence of the CPU, even though our system is running on an Athlon FX-60. Even this powerful dual-core processor cannot cope with the open spaces of the Oblivion world.

The dependence on the processor performance can also be observed on the tunnel levels, although here it is not that huge: the performance level here is much higher and rests around 75fps. Other than that, the picture is very similar to what we have already seen: there is a clear parity between the new Nvidia solution and ATI Radeon X1900 XTX. In multi-GPU systems this parity is broken in 1600x1200 where two GeForce 7900 GTX cards cannot reach the performance bar even though they are only 10% behind the Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire system.

So, we have to admit that despite very high graphics subsystem requirements the performance in TES IV: Oblivion can sometimes still be limited by the CPU speed. Even ATI Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire or Nvidia GeForce 7900 GTX SLI may not help you out here.