NVIDIA and ATI HDCP Compatible Graphics Cards Roundup
by Josh Venning on November 16, 2006 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Performance
We've talked a lot about The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and how it's one of the most graphics intensive games available right now. Games are always coming out that set new standards for graphics hardware, but for now, Oblivion remains one of the most taxing games for graphics cards to date. Thankfully though, Oblivion has a very large selection of quality settings that can be tweaked in order to allow users to optimize the game for their particular card. With Oblivion, it's very important in our opinion to get the highest quality possible out of the game graphics in order to fully enjoy the game. That is why we would suggest putting off playing this game if you have a lower-end graphics card until you can get an upgrade that can run the game at higher quality settings. These are the settings we used when testing Oblivion:
For our Oblivion benchmark we use FRAPS to record the average frame rate of a walkthrough of a specific section of the game world. Because there are no console commands for recording or playing back demos, this is one of our more difficult games to benchmark. The benchmark takes place in the wilderness at night, walking towards an imposing Oblivion gate, which is a gate surrounded by flames. There are several low-level enemies nearby who notice and attack the player as the benchmark runs, and the AI tends to vary in their actions a little - sometimes hitting the player with a fireball, and sometimes missing. This is something that adds a bit of variance to our tests, but the enemy AI is fairly consistent, and in order to get more accurate results, multiple tests are run at each resolution and an average is taken. This allows us to be fairly confident that our results are accurate and consistent.
In Oblivion, we see lower frame rates than in Battlefield 2, which is because Oblivion is a much more demanding game graphically. With lower quality settings, we would see more playable frame rates for these cards (a playable frame rate for this game would be around 25 fps in this particular benchmark), but we test at higher quality settings because we feel they are important to fully enjoying this game.
In this game, we can really see a difference in performance the 8800 makes over all the other cards. Even though this game tends to favor ATI hardware, the 8800 GTX blows away ATI's top card in this game, getting a 102% increase in performance over the Sapphire X1950 XTX at 1600x1200 resolution. The EVGA and BFG 7950 GX2s also do better than the ATI X1950 XTX in both resolutions because of their dual gpu advantage. We've found that ATI hardware generally does a little better with Oblivion than NVIDIA, and this is evident when we compare the reference X1650 XT with the 7600 GT, which are direct competitors to each other. As we saw in Battlefield 2, the 7600 GT generally did better than the X1650 XT, but here in Oblivion the X1650 XT is the better performer of the two. The worst performers again are the Gigabyte 7600 GS and the Powercolor X1600 PRO, but a number of these cards here have a hard time running this game well. If Oblivion is your game of choice, you will probably need to upgrade to at least a 7900 GS or better.
We've talked a lot about The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and how it's one of the most graphics intensive games available right now. Games are always coming out that set new standards for graphics hardware, but for now, Oblivion remains one of the most taxing games for graphics cards to date. Thankfully though, Oblivion has a very large selection of quality settings that can be tweaked in order to allow users to optimize the game for their particular card. With Oblivion, it's very important in our opinion to get the highest quality possible out of the game graphics in order to fully enjoy the game. That is why we would suggest putting off playing this game if you have a lower-end graphics card until you can get an upgrade that can run the game at higher quality settings. These are the settings we used when testing Oblivion:
| 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 |
For our Oblivion benchmark we use FRAPS to record the average frame rate of a walkthrough of a specific section of the game world. Because there are no console commands for recording or playing back demos, this is one of our more difficult games to benchmark. The benchmark takes place in the wilderness at night, walking towards an imposing Oblivion gate, which is a gate surrounded by flames. There are several low-level enemies nearby who notice and attack the player as the benchmark runs, and the AI tends to vary in their actions a little - sometimes hitting the player with a fireball, and sometimes missing. This is something that adds a bit of variance to our tests, but the enemy AI is fairly consistent, and in order to get more accurate results, multiple tests are run at each resolution and an average is taken. This allows us to be fairly confident that our results are accurate and consistent.
In Oblivion, we see lower frame rates than in Battlefield 2, which is because Oblivion is a much more demanding game graphically. With lower quality settings, we would see more playable frame rates for these cards (a playable frame rate for this game would be around 25 fps in this particular benchmark), but we test at higher quality settings because we feel they are important to fully enjoying this game.
In this game, we can really see a difference in performance the 8800 makes over all the other cards. Even though this game tends to favor ATI hardware, the 8800 GTX blows away ATI's top card in this game, getting a 102% increase in performance over the Sapphire X1950 XTX at 1600x1200 resolution. The EVGA and BFG 7950 GX2s also do better than the ATI X1950 XTX in both resolutions because of their dual gpu advantage. We've found that ATI hardware generally does a little better with Oblivion than NVIDIA, and this is evident when we compare the reference X1650 XT with the 7600 GT, which are direct competitors to each other. As we saw in Battlefield 2, the 7600 GT generally did better than the X1650 XT, but here in Oblivion the X1650 XT is the better performer of the two. The worst performers again are the Gigabyte 7600 GS and the Powercolor X1600 PRO, but a number of these cards here have a hard time running this game well. If Oblivion is your game of choice, you will probably need to upgrade to at least a 7900 GS or better.
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LoneWolf15 - Tuesday, November 21, 2006 - link
Behind Enemy Lines? Explains why Blu-Ray adoption is so slow.NullSubroutine - Friday, November 17, 2006 - link
I think ATi er AMD had been working on the drivers for GPU accelration for HD movies longer than Nvidia is all. You only have so much resources in a given department, it would make seense that Nvidia put more focus in other things (like Linux drives) where as Ati was working on this and Folding @ home stuff.dickie1900 - Friday, November 17, 2006 - link
Do you think the results will change for the 8800s when DX10 rolls out with Vista or are we going to have to wait for games to be developed that use some of the newer instructions?DigitalFreak - Friday, November 17, 2006 - link
I would doubt it. I don't believe Blu-Ray/HD-DVD decoding has anything to do with DirectX.DigitalFreak - Friday, November 17, 2006 - link
Dude, it's a unicorn. :-)
phusg - Friday, November 17, 2006 - link
First off, thanks for the great review.Why not? Many people just look at the graphs and this way they would miss out on the 2 quietest cards.
Also (unrelated), it's a shame there was no mention of AGP cards. I'm sure I'm not the only one looking to stretch the life of their AGP HTPC.
And one more thing (unrelated), aren't there initiatives that are looking to handle the HD decoding in software? I'd love a review of these. What is the slowest CPU you can decode HD content with?
mino - Wednesday, November 22, 2006 - link
I second that.EVERY noise measurement should include reference of the bacground (system without the thingie which noise one measures).
As those 0dB would would not be 0dB. There would be the noise of the system without the noise of the card - hence the bacground noise.
Try to consider that in the future. No much work required for MUCH information added.
Spoelie - Friday, November 17, 2006 - link
coreavc is the fastest h264 software decoder, no competitionTheir cpu-only implementation is most of the time faster than the competition WITH gpu support, but they're working on gpu support as well.
It is payware tho.
http://coreavc.corecodec.org/">http://coreavc.corecodec.org/
NullSubroutine - Friday, November 17, 2006 - link
I originally had written this up in response to an artical that MS Office has mandatory authentication checks when doing updates. However, I think the idea of what the "intellectual property" industry is putting consumers through is rediculous.....this just in, cars now 'phone home' to validate the vehicial is authentic prior to fixing factory installed parts.....refridgerator units must now be activated via phone call before the cooling units will work....lotion now comes with EULA, which is automatically agreed to at time of purchase (information is inside the bottle)....desk drawers will now automatically lock after free trial period has ended....fees must now be paid to bacteria colonies each time a user flushes the toilet....due to people stealing food, the price has increased 1000x, if the food is not authentic it will tell you, via voice, that your food is not real food, and where authentic food can be purchased if you give the food companies the information on where your not real food was purchased; when asked about the policy, supporters claimed that food was an optional luxery, paint companies now produce super ultra high quality paint products - but can only be applied with a special paint brush on special surface (microchips installed) or else the paint looks like normal paint - when cosumers were asked about the new paint they said it looked great but unless they wanted to buy all new everything, it was all meaningless...
shecknoscopy - Thursday, November 16, 2006 - link
Wow... the Blu-ray era's off to a stunning start, eh? No more complaining about the poor game options for the Wii launch, when the stunning new world of BLU-RAY is kicking off with "Click."
Lawdy, help us.
-Sheq