The Test - The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion CPU Performance
The Test
Thankfully ATI's CrossFire runs on both ATI chipsets as well as Intel's 975X, so we were able to use our ultra high end GPU of choice to compare CPU performance under Oblivion. Remember that, just like in our first Oblivion article, we're manually walking through portions of the game and using FRAPS to generate our results, and thus the margin for error in our tests is much higher than normal; differences in performance of 5% or less aren't significant and shouldn't be treated as such.
While we tested with a number of AMD CPUs, we had issues with our Intel test bed where we couldn't adjust clock multipliers to give us the full spread of Intel CPU options, and thus we were only able to highlight the performance of a handful of Intel CPUs. However, with what we had we were able to adequately characterize the performance offered by Intel solutions under Oblivion. We also didn't have an Extreme Edition 965 on hand, so the EE 955 is the fastest offering from Intel in the test. The EE 965 should offer another 5% or so above what the EE 955 offers based on the tests we've done, just in case you're curious.
| CPU: | AMD Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 X2s Intel Pentium Extreme Edition, Pentium D and Pentium 4 |
| Motherboard: | ASUS A8R32-MVP Intel X975XBX |
| Chipset: | ATI CrossFire 3200 Intel 975X |
| Chipset Drivers: | ATI Catalyst 6.4 Intel 7.2.2.1007 |
| Hard Disk: | Seagate 7200.9 300GB SATA |
| Memory: | 2 x 1GB OCZ PC3500 DDR 2-3-2-7 1T 2 x 1GB OCZ PC8000 DDR2 4-4-4-12 |
| Video Card(s): | ATI Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire |
| Video Drivers: | ATI Catalyst 6.4 w/ Chuck Patch |
| Desktop Resolution: | 1280 x 1024 - 32-bit @ 60Hz |
| OS: | Windows XP Professional SP2 |
Armed with a pair of X1900 XTs running in CrossFire mode - the clear GPU performance leader in our first Oblivion article - we set out to run some additional tests. Pay attention to the rest of the system as well: we've installed 2GB of high quality (i.e. low latency) RAM, which also helps performance. 1GB is sufficient, but Oblivion appears to do a good job of making use of additional memory; load times and area transitions are noticeably quicker with 2GB of RAM. We used the same "High Quality" settings we introduced in the last review:
| Oblivion Performance Settings | High Quality |
| Resolution | 1280x1024 |
| Texture Size | Large |
| Tree Fade | 50% |
| Actor Fade | 65% |
| Item Fade | 65% |
| Object Fade | 65% |
| Grass Distance | 50% |
| View Distance | 100% |
| Distant Land | On |
| Distant Buildings | On |
| Distant Trees | On |
| Interior Shadows | 50% |
| Exterior Shadows | 50% |
| Self Shadows | On |
| Shadows on Grass | On |
| Tree Canopy Shadows | On |
| Shadow Filtering | High |
| Specular Distance | 50% |
| HDR Lighting | On |
| Bloom Lighting | Off |
| Water Detail | High |
| Water Reflections | On |
| Water Ripples | On |
| Window Reflections | On |
| Blood Decals | High |
| Anti-aliasing | Off |
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7orrAp5utnZOde6S7zGiqoaenZH56hZZoaQ%3D%3D