While F.E.A.R. is definitely one of the best looking games out there, Oblivion certainly has raised the bar. With amazingly detailed textures, landscapes that go on for miles and miles when looking from the top of a hill and arguably the most beautiful lighting effects ever seen in a game, without a doubt, Oblivion is the most demanding (and gorgeous) game on the market today. So obviously, it was a prime choice to see just how powerful these 7600GT XXX cards were shaping up to be.
To test in Oblivion, I would hang out around an oblivion gate since those are probably the most demanding areas of the game with all of the crazy (and awesome) lighting effects going on both with the gate itself and the sky. Plus, being outdoors in strongly wooded areas allowed for all sorts of foliage interference to put even more strain on the cards.
After I got a good feel for how the card was doing from all around the gate, I would move away and find something to fight – usually a grizzly bear off in the woods or a few scamps that were hanging around the gate.
Finally, I would fast-travel into Skingrad and take a tour around the city to see how all the architecture and NPCs would impact performance. All scores below show the absolute minimum and maximum (barring looking at a black wall or something else that would cause the FPS to skyrocket) that FRAPS displayed onscreen. The average falls somewhere in-between the scores given. I did this in both 1280x1024 and 1024x768 with the following settings (for sliders, if not maxed out, the most approximate measure was given):
Texture size: Large
Tree Fade: Max
Actor Fade: Max
Item Fade: Max
Grass Distance: 1/3
View Distance: Max
Distant Land: On
Distant Buildings: On
Distant Trees: On
Internal Shadows: ¼
External Shadows: ¼
Self-Shadows: Off
Shadows on grass: Off
Tree Canopy Shadows: Off
Shadow Filtering: Low
Specular Distance: Yes
HDR: On
Bloom: Off
Water: High
Water Detail: High
Water Reflections: On
Water Ripples: On
Blood Decals: High
Antialiasing: None
Oblivion
1280x1024
Skingrad
Oblivion Gate
Combat
7600GT XXX (SLI)
42-59
24-27
26-30
7600GT XXX
28-54
18-22
20-26
7600GST (OC)
26-51
18-21
20-25
7600GST
22-53
17-20
16-23
6800GT
25-54
15-17
18-23
6800GT (SLI)
27-56
19-22
20-28
1024x768
Skingrad
Oblivion Gate
Combat
7600GT XXX (SLI)
46-63
25-27
28-31
7600GT XXX
31-58
21-26
24-27
7600GST (OC)
29-57
19-25
21-25
7600GST
25-53
19-23
20-24
6800GT
25-58
17-20
19-26
6800GT (SLI)
29-63
19-22
23-29
While it's somewhat of a jurry-rigged way of benchmarking, it's plainly obvious that the 7600GT XXX edition cards destroy the rest of the cards tested, especially in SLI mode. Running around the oblivion gate in SLI mode was silky smooth, even though the it was playing at less than 30fps. I never felt the game was choppy which says a lot about both the game being able to remain playable even at levels many would deem unplayable and the cards for being able to take such a graphically intense area and make it feel almost as good to play it as it did to look at it.
I used to be unable to enjoy playing Oblivion using just a single 6800GT with with the 7600GT XXX cards, I feel the same smoothness with one of those cards that I previously could only feel with the 6800s in SLI. And SLI mode with the 7600s is just...well, it's fantastic.
