Just how far has PC graphics performance come in the past 18 months? If our Oblivion benchmark results are anything to go by an awfully long way. Nvidia's latest and greatest, the 7900 GTX, is around 2.5 times quicker in the brutal Great Forest benchmark than the 6800 Ultra, the processor that marked Nvidia's return to form after the debacle that was the GeForce FX family.
ATI's Shader Model 2 oldtimer, the Radeon X850 XT PE, doesn't support HDR lighting, of course. Nevertheless, it put in some extremely respectable scores with Bloom lighting enabled. You can thank the X850's 540 MHz core clock speed and its relatively lean, mean 24-bit precision rendering engine for that.
Summary
- Elder Scrolls IV: Computer Oblivion
- Testing Oblivion: Not Quite A Straightforward Matter
- The Settings
- Entry-Level Performance: Radeon X1600 XT And GeForce 6600 GT
- Entry-Level Performance, Continued
- Mid-Range Performance: Radeon X1800 GTO And GeForce 7600 GT
- Mid-Range Performance, Continued
- High-End Performance: Radeon X1900 XTX And GeForce 7900 GTX
- High-End Performance, Continued
- Image Quality Options In Detail: The Great Forest
- Memory Buffer Comparison: 256 MB Vs 512 MB
- Golden Oldies: ATI Radeon X850 XT PE And Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra
- Oblivion Multi-Threading: Single Versus Dual-Core Performance
- Pixel Shading Performance: ATI's R520 Vs R580
- Wrapping Things Up: What Have We Learnt?
