Fall '06 NVIDIA GPU Refresh - Part II: GeForce 7950 GT and SLI

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Performance

While it is disappointing that Oblivion doesn't have a built in benchmark, our FRAPS tests have proven to be fairly repeatable and very intensive on every part of a system. While these numbers will reflect real world playability of the game, please remember that our test system uses the fastest processor we could get our hands on. If a purchasing decision is to be made using Oblivion performance alone, please check out our two articles on the CPU and GPU performance of Oblivion. We have used the most graphically intensive benchmark in our suite, but the rest of the platform will make a difference. We can still easily demonstrate which graphics card is best for Oblivion even if our numbers don't translate to what our readers will see on their systems.

Running through the forest towards an Oblivion gate while fireballs fly by our head is a very graphically taxing benchmark. In order to run this benchmark, we have a saved game that we load and run through with FRAPS. To start the benchmark, we hit "q" which just runs forward, and start and stop FRAPS at predetermined points in the run. While not 100% identical each run, our benchmark scores are usually fairly close. We run the benchmark a couple times just to be sure there wasn't a one time hiccup.

As for settings, we tested a few different configurations and decided on this group of options:

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

Our goal was to get acceptable performance levels under the current generation of cards at 1600x1200. This was fairly easy with the range of cards we tested here. These settings are amazing and very enjoyable. While more is better in this game, no current computer will give you everything at high res. Only the best multi-GPU solutions and a great CPU are going to give you settings like the ones we have at high resolutions, but who cares about grass distance, right?

While Oblivion is very graphically intensive and is played mostly from a first person perspective (and some third person), this definitely isn't a twitch shooter. Our experience leads us to conclude that 20fps gives a good experience. It's playable a little lower, but watch out for some jerkiness that may pop up. Getting down to 16fps and below is a little too low to be acceptable. The main point to bring home is that you really want as much eye candy as possible. While Oblivion is an immersive and awesome game from a gameplay standpoint, the graphics certainly help draw the gamer in.



The GeForce 7950 GT hits our playable framerate mark at 1280x1024 with a comfortable 23.4 fps. While the X1900 XT does outperform the 7950 GT by a good margin, for the price we still see acceptable performance from NVIDIA's new part.



From the NVIDIA camp, the 7950 GT and 7900 GTX are barely playable at 1600x1200. While the 7900 GS isn't as capable, adding a second card for SLI is a viable option to support this resolution if necessary. Owners of higher end LCD panels will benefit from lower resolutions in spite of the scaling, as the effects are more important in this game. In order to run anything higher than 1600x1200 with these settings, the minimum requirement is a 7950 GT SLI setup. An X1900 / X1950 CrossFire setup is the absolute best option in the case of Oblivion though.