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- Date:
- Tuesday , January 09, 2007
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
ASUS EN8800 GTX
We have a brand new ASUS EN8800 GTX installed on our high-end Core 2 Duo gaming machine. We dive into the gaming experience delivered in six popular new games. See how NVIDIA’s newest generation dominates the competition’s fastest offering.
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
(DirectX 9)
Oblivion 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. You really have to look at the game as two different scenarios, Outdoors and Indoors.
Thanks to reader feedback we have found some interesting performance results to publish concerning the GeForce 8800 GTX in Oblivion. Grass has been a graphics burden for every video card we have tested, until the GeForce 8800 GTX; at least we thought so at first. We have played through many parts of the game with full grass enabled on the GeForce 8800 GTX and found it to be superior to every video card out there with performance. We found that overall in this game you can play with maximum grass enabled and the highest in-game settings at 1600x1200 with 8X TR MSAA and 16X AF. However, there are some areas in the game where the grass takes a huge performance hit even on the ASUS EN8800 GTX.
In the screenshot above we have all the settings at the levels you see in the table, including grass at its highest level. You can clearly see that the framerate here is 16 FPS which is not playable.
Now, look at this screenshot above, we have moved the grass slider down to the level where it is now playable in this area. If you look above at our graphed results doing a 15 minute run-through which takes us from the city up deep into the forest you will see that the game is very playable with full grass enabled.
It seems that for the most part Oblivion is playable with full grass; there may however be a few areas like the one shown above where you may have to turn the grass down to a low level. Luckily you can manipulate the grass slider in-game without needing to restart the game, so if performance isn’t where you want it you can lower this setting on the fly.
Compared to the ATI Radeon X1950 XTX, the ASUS EN8800 GTX blows it out of the water. We are able to play at a higher resolution, with a higher level of AA and with higher in-game quality settings. The experience is much improved, even with the grass at a minimal level. Notice that we had to disable the grass completely on the ATI Radeon X1950 XTX to obtain enough performance for playability.
Image Quality
Screenshots below are in PNG format to eliminate compression artifacts and can range in file size of 1-3 MB.
In the first screenshot above you can see how the larger resolution and full grass setting allow a more immersive experience. The second screenshot illustrates the benefits of 8X AA, in-game this bridge has some aliasing even at 4X AA on the ATI Radeon X1950 XTX at 1280x1024, with 8X AA it among all other objects have no signs of aliasing.