Table of Contents
Video Card Performance
Oblivion is a fairly well-balanced game in that it challenges the CPU and the GPU almost equally. If you have a powerful GPU, you'll need a fast processor to make it shine. If you like playing at high resolutions, a better video card will take you a long way. The ATI Radeon X1900 series cards put up the fastest results, but, as we noted earlier, ATI also has some rendering anomalies with self-shadowing enabled (Nvidia has the same problem, but to a lesser extent). ATI has acknowledged the problem, and is currently working with the developer to fix the issue. ATI's previous generation of chips (the X800, X700, X600, and X300) cannot render HDR at all, we've moved these cards to the bottom of our graphs to indicate this.
The game gives all our midrange and budget video cards a solid thrashing. Anything with 12 pixel pipes and fewer will struggle to render the game with all the settings enabled. You're going to have to give up graphical quality to get decent frame rates on a midrange card. The GeForce 7600 GT walks away the clear winner in this category. The Radeon X700 Pro looks like a winner, but we had to remove it from the main pack because Radeon cards from the X800 era aren't able to render HDR in Oblivion. Once we level the playing fields by turning off all the settings, we see that it lags behind every other card.
Keep in mind that since this game is somewhat CPU bound, your frame rates will scale with CPU power.
High End Performance Tests
(FPS - Longer bars indicate better performance)
Mid Range Video Card Performance
(FPS - Longer bars indicate better performance)
Low End Video Card Performance
(FPS - Longer bars indicate better performance)
Minimum Settings Performance Tests
(FPS - Longer bars indicate better performance)
System Setup:
AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 CPU, Asus A8N32 SLI Deluxe Motherboard, 1GB (512MB x 2) Corsair XMS Memory, 160GB Seagate 7200.7 SATA Hard Disk Drive, Windows XP Professional SP2.
Graphics Cards: GeForce 7900 GTX, GeForce 7900 GT, GeForce 7800 GTX, GeForce 7800GT, GeForce 7600 GT, GeForce 6800 GS, GeForce 6800, GeForce 6600 GT, GeForce 6200TC, Radeon X1900 XT, Radeon X1800 XT, Radeon X1800 XL, Radeon X1600 XT, Radeon X1300, Radeon X850XT, Radeon X800 XL, Radeon X700 Pro, Radeon X300 SE.
Graphics Drivers: Nvidia ForceWare 84.25, ATI Catalyst 6.2. (Due to system instability, we could not use the Catalyst 6.3 drivers)
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