X-bit labs

Silence of the Radeon HD 2600: Gigabyte GV-RX26T256H Graphics Card Review (page 13)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 11/19/2007 | 11:51 PM ]

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

The game loses much of its visual appeal without HDR. Although some gamers argue that point, we think TES IV looks best with enabled FP HDR and test it in this mode.

The Gigabyte GV-RX26T256H is handicapped in this test by its reduced memory bandwidth. Instead of competing with the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS, it is only as fast as the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT. Its performance is quite sufficient for resolutions up to 1600x1200, though.

The open vistas of The Elder Scrolls IV put forth completely different requirements to the graphics card. The speeds are lower here than in the closed environments, but the Gigabyte card is not slower than the GeForce 8600 GT, even outperforming the latter in higher resolutions. We recommend limiting the resolution to 1280x1024 since its minimum of speed, like that of the other mainstream cards, is below 20fps at 1600x1200.