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.