Performance in RPG

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

The Nvidia GeForce 7 architecture doesn’t permit to use FP16 HDR along with full-screen antialiasing, but without HDR the game loses much of its visual appeal. That’s why we test the cards here with anisotropic filtering only. The game doesn’t offer integrated benchmarking tools, so we measured the frame rate manually with the Fraps utility. The numbers may be somewhat inaccurate as a consequence.

The GeForce 7900 GS looks preferable to the Radeon X1800 GTO and GeForce 7600 GT in closed game scenes because it has 20 pixel processors against the opponents’ 12. Moreover, the new product from Nvidia successfully rivals the Radeon X1900 GT and X1950 Pro that are built according to ATI’s 3-to-1 concept and have 36 pixel processors, but only 12 TMUs and 12 ROPs.

As opposed to closed environments, the Radeon X1800 GTO feels much more at ease in the open and overtakes the GeForce 7900 GS. This must be due to its more efficient memory controller. The cards have low speeds in general, so you won’t have much comfort when playing this game on them, but note that the Radeon X1950 Pro provides the best performance among non-overclocked cards.

Titan Quest

The results produced by this test are quite a surprise. The GeForce 7900 GS is much slower not only than the Radeon X1950 Pro but also than the Radeon X1800 GTO. We hadn’t seen Nvidia’s cards perform like than in Titan Quest, so this must be some problem with the ForceWare driver. Anyway, the results suggest that 4x full-screen antialiasing is not recommended on mainstream $199 graphics cards in Titan Quest due to very low performance in that mode.