The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion GPU Performance
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 26, 2006 1:07 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
When both Doom 3 and Half Life 2 came out we burned the midnight oil trying to put together guides for CPU and GPU performance in the games as soon as they were released. Much to our surprise, especially given the performance hype that had preceeded both of them, both games ran relatively well on most mainstream hardware that was available at the time. One GPU generation later and the worries about performance under Doom 3 and Half Life 2 were yesterday's news. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said about Bethesda Softworks' latest immersive RPG: Oblivion.
The game itself is more addicting and immersive than any of its predecessors and its reviews confirm that. But we're not here to tell you that the game is great, we're here to tell you what you need to run it. The fact of the matter is that Oblivion is the most stressful game we've ever encountered, taking the crown away from F.E.A.R. as something that simply doesn't run well on anything. Obtaining good performance under Oblivion is so hard that a number of optimization guides have popped up helping users do whatever it takes to make the game playable. At AnandTech we've been using the Oblivion Tweak Guide from Tweakguides.com and recommend reading it if you're looking to get a good idea for the impact of the many visual settings available in the game.
Just as we've done in our previous articles on Doom 3 and Half Life 2, we're splitting our Oblivion performance coverage into multiple parts. This first part will focus on high-end and mid-range PCIe GPU performance and future articles will look at CPU performance as well as low-end GPU and AGP platform performance if there is enough demand for the latter two. Where we take this series of articles in the future will depend on many of your demands and requests, so please make them heard.
Benchmarking Oblivion
There are really three types of areas you encounter while playing Oblivion, you'll find your character either: 1) Outdoors, 2) Inside a town but still outdoors, or 3) Inside a building or dungeon. Interestingly enough, our seemingly haphazard list of Oblivion locales is actually organized in ascending order of performance. You'll encounter your absolute highest performance inside buildings while you'll actually contemplate spending $1200 on graphics cards whenever you find yourself outside. It only made sense that we benchmarked in each of those three areas, so we constructed manually scripted (read: walk-throughs by hand) benchmarks taking us through one of each type of area in Oblivion.
Oblivion Gate Benchmark
The first test is our Oblivion Gate benchmark, which just so happens to be the most stressful out of all three. In this test we've spotted an Oblivion gate in The Great Forest and walk towards it as scamps attempt to attack our character. The benchmark takes place in a heavily wooded area with lots of grass; combined with the oblivion gate itself, even the fastest GPUs will have trouble breaking 30 fps here.
Town Benchmark
The next test takes place in the town of Bruma and simply features our character walking through a portion of the town. There are a few other characters on screen but no major interaction takes place. Despite the simplicity of the test, since it takes place outside the frame rate is already quite stressful on some mid-range GPUs.
Dungeon Benchmark
Our final test takes place in the Sanctum on our way to the Imperial City prisons; this "Dungeon" benchmark showcases indoor area performance and consists of our character sneaking through the dimly lit Sanctum. There are guards around however none appear in the view of our character. Many cards will do well in this test, but unless they can pass the first benchmark their performance here is meaningless.
We measured frame rates using FRAPS and reported both the minimum and average frame rates in our charts (we left out maximum frame rates because they simply aren't as important and they made the graphs a little too difficult to read when we included them). The minimum frame rates are indicated by a vertical white line inside the bar representing average frame rate.
Since we measured performance using FRAPS and not through a scripted timedemo sequence, the amount of variance between runs is higher than normal; differences in performance of 5% or less aren't significant and shouldn't be treated as such.
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blackbrrd - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
Using the BTmod myself, it works for me ;)I would like a few more shortcut keys myself, but other than that, it took me about 2 minutes to figure out how to use the interface. The 8 free shortkeys that you can assign to weapons/spells/potions etc works well, you just want more shortkeys :P
I am playing the game on a laptop with a radeon 9600. It obviosly doesn't look as good as in the pictures, but it runs ok, so I would say that the graphics engine scales nicely for any graphics card bought the last 2-3 years*
*A friend of mine has a geforce fx5900 and he gets horrible performance - there should have been a seperate shader 1.x path for those cards.
I do agree that the game is just nearly finished, for instance the textures for 256mb and 512mb graphics cards could be much larger, there are several mods available as it is, but it should have been in the game.
All in all I think it was a good compromise between launching the game as early as possible and performance wise. Personally I haven't had any problems with the game except for multitasking which won't work properly if you don't pull down the console first :P **
**The game has quirks - but its a good game, and there are work arounds. :) Its also the first game that have made me actually consider upgradeing/buying a proper gameing machine.
kmmatney - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
There is a shader 1.X path - look up Oldblivion. it allows the game to run on the 5900 quite well, from what I've heard.Ryan Norton - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
the elderscrolls.com/forums do crack me the fuck up... there is literally no aspect of the game no matter how glaringly mis-implemented that the fanboys will not defend to their last gasp.I don't have a link for it, but the website/guy that does "tweak guides" for 3D games put up a super-lengthy one for Oblivion. I'd already stumbled onto some of the things but it was still good for making the game seem a little smoother outdoors.
I love the line about outdoors performance making users contemplate $1200 on video cards... until I started playing Obliv I'd always thought SLI a waste of money, but now I catch myself thinking "hmm another 7800GTX is 'only' another $450"... must restrain self.
Powermoloch - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
I had been waiting for quite a while for anandtech's take on oblivion. And I'm very surprised that you got alot of GPUs tested out for us. Especially being a x850xt agp owner, I'm very pleased that it has enough juice to play @ 1280x1024 at almost @ med-high settings lol.Kudos for the great job guys, great benchmark results ;).
Frallan - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - link
I agree!!!Excelent Reveiw!!!
But as an owner of older Hardware Id love to know where my 6800Gt stumbles in on the list. Usually I run it @ 425/1150 which is almost Ultra speeds but....
Please any1 who is in the know???
bob661 - Thursday, April 27, 2006 - link
You can compare it to the 6800GS. They're the same card.michal1980 - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
playing the xbox 360 version.and really, it does not look much better then like hlf2.
I'm sorry but anyone that says (not that anyone here has) that this is a great engine with great graphics needs to take a break.
there can be alot going on sometimes, but the draw distance sucks, loads every 2 mins. controls are a little wishy washy.
its an ok game, but at times seems way to unfocused. with a story line that is weak at best.
Jackyl - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
Correct. The graphics are not "next gen" as was hyped. The problem with the performance of the gamebryo engine is that it doesn't support culling, hidden-surface removal. It draws everything, which causes a lot of slow down. If you are outside, standing behind a building, it still calculates whatever is on the other side, even though you can't see it. Bad design IMO for a "next gen" engine.JarredWalton - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
Okay, I'm not going to dispute your claims, but how on earth do you know that the engine isn't doing HSR? Damn, that was one of the first things that was discussed in terms of 3D engine optimization in my Graphics class. I'm not sure how you prove what they are or aren't doing without seeing the code, though.I also have to say that I don't think the Gamebryo engine is as bad as you're making it out to be. I see very little in the way of load times (the "loading" screens are mostly there for Xbox360), large outdoor areas, relatively nice effects (HDR, reflections, etc.), and generally interesting gameplay mechanics. You're certainly not going to get all of these things from other engines on the market. Doom3 would choke outdoors, for example.
What we need is an engine that offers:
Doom3 indoor areas
Far Cry outdoors
HL2/FEAR shaders
Dungeon Siege load times
Any UI that doesn't have console roots! UGH! Sell... Are you sure? Buy... Are you sure? Heaven forbid that we actually sell more than one type of item at a time. How about something like Fallout's barter interface, with a few tweaks to bring it into 2006 era? Also, what the hell is the point of "maximum gold" for a shop. "I can only buy $500 worth of stuff at a time, but if you sell things to me one at a time, I can effectively buy out your whole inventory!" Thank you Bethesda for dumbing down the economic system. Maybe they should have more magical weapons readily available, and then allow you to trade equipment to get them recharged? Naw, real bartering would make too much sense....
nts - Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - link
Hidden surface removal is obviously there, every game has it lol :pWhat this game needs and is missing is some sort of Occlusion Culling (not sending down geometry that won't be visible in the final frame, eg terrain/trees/grass behind city walls).