• Need newish coop game to play on steam.
• Need recommendation (Asus P8Z77 series)
• wtb: gtx 680
• Good wall color to go behind a HDTV?
• WTB/WTF: IDE to SATA adapter
• [WTB] 60$ or less video card for wifes comput...

• The Apple-II by Stephen Wozniak: How about a ...
• Hacktivists Claim Takedown of Chicago Police ...
• 19-year-old Egyptian Invents Propulsion Devic...
• Windows 8 Gives Parents a Computer-Use Report...
• U.K. Gov't Proposes New Data Surveillance Pro...
• Time Warner Cable Customers Can Access HBO GO...

Sapphire RADEON X1650 XT

Can Sapphire's new X1650 XT take a bite out of the GeForce 7600 GT's market domination? We show you what you can expect out of your X1650 XT and 7600 GT in real world gameplay. You might be surprised what we see out of ATI's new "sub-$150" video card.

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

(DirectX 9)

Oblivion is the next Elder Scrolls game and the unconnected sequel to Morrowind. It uses the multi-platform Gamebryo game engine. Oblivion features DirectX 9 shaders and Havok physics. The engine supports lush vegetation, soft shadows, and high dynamic range lighting (HDR). Oblivion also features SpeedTree for rendering trees.

For testing, we have chosen to do a manual run-through riding horseback from outside the Imperial City to Chorrol to Bruma. This run-through allows us to push the hardware as much as the game can. While this is an outdoor run-through, we do make sure to test indoor situations in our gameplay analysis as well. We have found that turning on the torch indoors with HDR lighting takes a big hit on performance in some situations. We make sure to test this scenario, and the posted configuration screenshots reflect the results of testing both indoor and outdoor scenarios.

Oblivion runs quite well on both of these video cards. They were each able to run with the same in-game settings, and each gave us close to the same framerates. For the more framerate conscious, the Tree/Actor/Item/Object fade settings could be lowered to the middle mark, but we found these settings quite playable and enjoyable.

Oblivion ran at 1024x768 on these video cards, with fade settings set at reasonably high level. We had to disable grass, as usual, because grass creates a tremendous performance impact, even at the lowest setting. All shadows except "Int/Ext Shadows" were disabled. Both the RADEON X1650 XT and the GeForce 7600 GT allowed us to use HDR.

Image Quality

With each video card able to run the same settings, there are no image quality differences in Oblivion.