I know I say it every time I use it to benchmark and this time is going to be no different: Oblivion is the most gorgeous game EVER, as far as I'm concerned, and easily one of the most addicting. Thankfully, I've been able to stave off most of my cravings to focus on schoolwork and whatnot, but the allure of Oblivion is always at the back of my mind and I often catch myself thinking about how awesome the trees look swaying in the wind, lit up in the glow of an HDR-infused sunset. Absolutely wonderful.
It doesn't take much for Oblivion to really bring even the most powerful of systems to its knees, so I did what I could to make sure these graphics cards were left gasping after having a battle royale directly in front of an Oblivion gate with numerous Daedra coming at me and a light drizzle adding to the fray.
All settings except for grass shadows and self-shadows were pushed as high as possible and the game was tested using AA/Bloom and HDR at 1600x1200, 1280x1024 and 1024x768. Just like Prey, I used the same quicksave every time in hopes of getting as close to identical results as possible.
Oblivion Performance
I was expecting the gap between the GeForce 7900 GT and the GeForce 7900 GS OC to be quite huge, but surprisingly, the GeForce 7900 GS OC was keeping up and even outperforming it in a few instances. And, even more surprising is that the GeForce 7900 GS at stock speeds wasn't ever all that far behind either the other two.
Granted, all the graphics cards are using the same core, but still, I figured the lessened number of shaders and mass decrease in clock speeds would cause performance to really suffer on the GeForce 7900 GS at stock speeds, but that was definitely not the case.
