The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Performance

Many times we preface our tests with comments about the game we are testing, and Oblivion just happens to be one that we can't say enough good things about. There still isn't much out there in the way of competition to this game just in terms of graphical intensity, but we would also say it's one of the richest, most beautiful, and most involving RPGs we've ever played for the PC.

Because the terrain is so varied, we came up with a few different benchmarks within the game to test different environments. Much of the gameplay is spent in caves and dark ruins so this was one of the tests. Another test was in a snowy village outside with a few NPCs around. The last test was out in the wilderness at night, surrounded by a few fireball-shooting enemies, and walking towards an impressive Oblivion gate, which makes use of a lot of the game's lighting and fire effects. This last test is the most demanding on our graphics cards, so this was the benchmark we've chosen to include for these performance tests.

Oblivion thankfully allows extensive control over the graphics quality settings in the game, and most users will find it necessary to tweak these settings to some degree to find the best setting for their system. These are the quality settings we used for these tests.

Oblivion Performance Settings
Texture Size Large
Tree Fade 100%
Actor Fade 100%
Item Fade 66%
Object Fade 90%
Grass Distance 50%
View Distance 100%
Distant Land On
Distant Buildings On
Distant Trees On
Interior Shadows 95%
Exterior Shadows 85%
Self Shadows On
Shadows on Grass On
Tree Canopy Shadows On
Shadow Filtering High
Specular Distance 100%
HDR Lighting On
Bloom Lighting Off
Water Detail High
Water Reflections On
Water Ripples On
Window Reflections On
Blood Decals High
Anti-aliasing Off

With the settings turned up to their highest, the game is truly breathtaking, and conversely, if certain key settings are turned down to their lowest (for example, view distance), the game loses much in the way of aesthetics, and more importantly loses a lot of enjoyable gameplay. For this reason, we don't really recommend trying to play this game if your graphics card is at all low-end.

While playing this game, the FPS has a tendency to sometimes slow down a lot. For instance, when you come near an Oblivion gate and suddenly several scamps spawn out of it and start attacking you, the potential for a frame rate drop is very high. Generally though, an average frame rate of about 20 or higher in our test is good enough to enjoy the game; any lower than this would be risky and probably would take away from the gameplay. While it isn't generally a very fast-paced game (a twitch-shooter it isn't) there are times when you need to act fast, and choppy frame rates will definitely hinder this.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion


We can see here first off how graphically intense this game is compared to the previous two. This particular benchmark is so demanding that only the most powerful graphics cards could hope to run it at 1600x1200 and up (with high quality settings). With Oblivion, we would generally recommend playing it at a lower resolution with the quality settings as high as possible, as this way the game still looks very good.

An interesting thing about Oblivion is that it favors ATI hardware over NVIDIA, and this is evident here when we look at the X1650 XT compared with the 7600 GT. In this case, the X1650 XT has a small but significant performance lead over the 7600 GT. Because of this, the X1650 XT is more likely to be playable at 1024x768 than the 7600 GT. This is one case where the X1650 XT clearly beats the 7600 GT just in terms of performance. Oblivion players may want to consider this card once it's available, but only assuming the price is reasonable.

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  • guidryp - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link

    They spec like this:

    1650XT: 8 vertex Pipes, 24 pixel pipes, 8 Raster pipes, 575MHz, Mem 675MHz X 128 bus.
    7600GT: 5 vertex Pipes, 12 pixel pipes, 8 Raster pipes 560MHz, Mem 700MHz X 128 bus.

    And the ATI card barely holds it's own? I was expecting a walkaway after reading the specs.
  • coldpower27 - Saturday, November 4, 2006 - link

    It should be 24 Pixel Shaders vs 12 Pixel Shaders.

    while both have 8 ROP's, it is probably the X1650 XT only has 8 TMU while the 7600 GT has 12 as both are half their flagship derivatives. Ignore vertex amounts those tpyically aren't half and don't contribute to much on the most part to performance it seems anyway.

    X1900 XTX 48 Pixel Shaders, 16 Rasterization Operators, 650MHZ, Mem 775MHZ x 256 Bit Bus
    7900 GTX 24 Pixel Shaders, 16 Rasterization Operators, 650MHZ, Mem 800MHZ x 256 Bit Bus

    The X1900 XTX doesn't walkaway from the 7900 GTX on the whole either.
  • trinibwoy - Wednesday, November 1, 2006 - link

    Do you guys do other testing that you comment on that is not represented by the graphs? The numbers show a 1 fps difference, yet you use terms like "significant" and "clearly beats". Maybe some median low fps numbers would help demonstrate what you're saying.

    quote:

    An interesting thing about Oblivion is that it favors ATI hardware over NVIDIA, and this is evident here when we look at the X1650 XT compared with the 7600 GT. In this case, the X1650 XT has a small but significant performance lead over the 7600 GT. Because of this, the X1650 XT is more likely to be playable at 1024x768 than the 7600 GT. This is one case where the X1650 XT clearly beats the 7600 GT just in terms of performance. Oblivion players may want to consider this card once it's available, but only assuming the price is reasonable.
  • soydeedo - Monday, October 30, 2006 - link

    hey i know i can make an educated guess as to where the x1650xt would end up on q4 benches compared to nvidia's offerings, but i'm still curious why this game was not included in the testing? with quakewars around the corner i think people are still interested in doom 3 engine performance.
  • johnsonx - Monday, October 30, 2006 - link

    I suppose this name is part of ATI's general trend lately. It used to be that the XT moniker meant the same GPU with slightly higher clocks. Now it seems like the XT parts are a separate family. The X1300XT has nothing to do with the other X1300's (rather it's a rebadged X1600Pro), the X1900XT has more pipes than non-XT members of the X1900 family, and now the X1650XT has nothing to do with the rest of the X1600/1650 family.

    It all makes it a bit hard to choose.
  • Kougar - Monday, October 30, 2006 - link

    On page 10 it is mentioned that

    quote:

    Something that jumps out at us here is that the X1650 XT got slightly better performance than the 7600 GT in both of these games with 4xAA enabled. Without AA enabled, the 7600 GT did better than the X1650 XT in these games. The amount of difference between the performance of both of these cards is about the same with and without AA.


    This is completely going against the bar graphs, specifically the HL Episode One graph. The x1650XT got up and began walking away from the 7600GT without AA, but with AA it tripped and slide into place just behind the 7600GT. At resolutions below 1600by1200 it even began losing by a sizeable margin.
  • Josh Venning - Monday, October 30, 2006 - link

    This paragraph has been tweaked a little bit. In HL2 Episode one the X1650 XT only does better than the 7600 GT at the highest resolution with AA enabled, but in Battlefield 2 it performs a little better over most of the resolutions.
  • Cybercat - Monday, October 30, 2006 - link

    How many vertex units does this thing have?
  • JarredWalton - Monday, October 30, 2006 - link

    See (updated) table on page 2: it has 8 vertex units, 24 pixel pipes, and 8 ROPs. Basically, lots more power than the X1600 XT. I would guess the pixel pipes are more like R580 pipes (i.e. more shader power, but not necessarily the same as an NVIDIA pixel pipeline in raw power).
  • Cybercat - Monday, October 30, 2006 - link

    Alright, cool. I keep a chart with stats of graphics cards, so I'm just making sure I have the vertice throughput correct. Other than the useless X1650 Pro, ATI seems to have a much more competitive mainstream line now. There is now more confusion than ever, though.

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