The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion GPU Performance
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 26, 2006 1:07 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
Looking at the performance offered by a variety of GPUs in Oblivion makes one thing clear: this game is the most stressful title on the market right now. We've focused primarily on stock performance using commonly available settings, but if you're serious about getting the most out of Oblivion we highly recommend looking at some of the tweak guides to help balance performance with appearance. For now, those of you hoping to run Oblivion at 1920x1200 with all the detail settings at maximum will need to wait for future GPU generations. But how do the current generation of cards fare?
At the high end, there's no better solution than ATI's Radeon X1900 series. While NVIDIA can offer similar performance with the GeForce 7900 GTX, its minimum frame rates aren't anywhere near as high as what ATI can deliver, meaning that the X1900 series will give you a much better overall experience. Oblivion is quite possibly the first game we've ever benchmarked where having multiple GPUs is almost necessary to get good frame rates at relatively common resolutions with most of the impressive visual effects turned on. The performance offered by a pair of X1900 XTs simply can't be matched by any single card, but as good of a game as Oblivion is you'd have to have a pretty serious computer budget to accommodate the $1200 that a pair of X1900 CrossFire GPUs will set you back.
Looking at mid range offerings, our recommendation sticks with ATI as the Radeon X1800 XT continues ATI's trend of offering absolutely stellar performance (relatively speaking) under Oblivion. At $200, the GeForce 7600 GT also proved to be a fairly strong contender in our medium quality tests.
In terms of upgrades, if you've got a CrossFire or SLI motherboard, adding a second GPU can improve performance by 25-50% in our Oblivion Gate test. X1600 CrossFire is probably the cheapest upgrade offering reasonable, assuming you already own an Radeon X1600 XT. At around $150 you really can't go wrong there. Moving from a single 6800 GS or 7600 GT to SLI also provides nearly 50% more performance, but the cost will be a bit higher.
If you own a slightly older card like something in the Radeon X800/X850 series, you honestly don't really need an upgrade to get better performance under Oblivion. Moving to a Shader Model 3.0 card like something in ATI's Radeon X1800 or X1900 series will give you HDR support and you'll be able to turn up some more eye candy, but then you're talking about a fairly significant upgrade investment. Moving to an X1800 XT will set you back more than $300 and still not offer you tremendous performance at higher image quality settings; for that you'll have to turn to a X1900 XT or XTX. Owners of the GeForce 6 series are in a similar situation: lowering your expectations a bit may be better than spending a lot of money on an upgrade.
This is just the tip of the iceberg however; we have a general idea of what GPUs do the best and worst in Oblivion but what about CPUs? And at what point does it stop making sense to spend money on new graphics cards versus just going out and buying the Xbox 360 version instead? We'll be answering those questions and more as our Oblivion coverage continues...
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Crassus - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
Here, demand *wave* (at least concerning an AGP platform review). I've got a trusty K8N Neo2 with a 939 3000+ and a 6800 GT that was sort of standard about 1 1/2 years ago and I'm trying to figure out if I would gain a FPS increase worth talking about switching over to PCIe, while staying in about the same price range, or getting a 7800 AGP, or just turning down settings and saving the money.
Cheers and thanks for an article that I was very anxious to read.
Ozenmacher - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
Everyone argues about how bad the performance is outside. I am running a 7900 GT and I was getting around 20 fps outside, I truned the grass off completely and now I get over 30. And honestly, I don't even notice it. I tjhink the game looks better than the rather lame looking grass.Madellga - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
I can't see any pictures in this article. I've tried both IE and Firefox, at 2 different computers.Is it only me or anyone else has the same?
JarredWalton - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - link
Can you see the graphs even?nicolasb - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - link
I can't see any of the pictures either, including the graphs.I'm getting really fed up of this happening in Anandtech articlres: it's been happening on and off for months, now. Could you guys please <b>sort it out</b>? It's really very unprofessional to have allowed the problem to go on for this long.
JarredWalton - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - link
Nothing has changed on the images in a long time. Are you surfing from work or home? Do you have any ad blocking software? I suppose it could also be browser settings. I know you can configure Internet Explorer and Firefox to not load images by default, or to only load images for the originating web site. The article content comes from www.AnandTech.com or as the images come from images.AnandTech.com. There's really nothing for us to sort out if the problem is on your end, but hopefully my comments will help you solve your issues.Madellga - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - link
I found it. The feature causing the problem is Privacy Control. I just turned off and now the page works fine.JarredWalton - Friday, April 28, 2006 - link
I'm glad to hear you got it working. If it's any consolation, I've felt that every release of Norton Internet Security since 2002 has actually been a step backwards. The latest release seems more bulky, slow, and more prone to causing errors. There was a time where I thought Norton Utilities was the greatest thing ever in terms of useful software. Windows 95 started to reduce its usefulness, and as far as I'm concerned windows XP pretty much killed it off. These days, I feel like I can get better overall quality from free software in many cases.I think the only reason Symantec is still in business is due to all of their bundling agreements with various computer manufacturers. So many systems come with Symantec software preinstalled as a 90 day trial, but lucky for me I've found that 90 days gives me more than enough time to uninstall the junk! I've found that a hardware firewall is generally much more useful, in that it's less likely to cause problems, either with web sites or with system performance.
Madellga - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - link
It was definetely not the browser. All options are default.Add blocking is turned off. I have to find which Norton feature is causing the issue. Interesting enough, the problem seems to happen only at Anandtech.
Madellga - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - link
Thanks for the reply. I am surfing from home and I have this problem since a couple of weeks. Based on the comments above, the only thing I have running that could be the problem is Norton Internet Security......I just turned off the Norton Firewall and reloaded the page. Now it works!
Jeez, it sounds silly but I expected more from Symantec. And my copy is an original one, legally purchased - no hacking.
That feels awful....