Date:
Monday , January 22, 2007
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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Real-World Gaming CPU Comparison with 8800 GTX SLI

AMD and Intel head-to-head. With NVIDIA's 8800 series GPU supplying a big jump in performance over the last generation of video cards, we revisit just what these CPUs do for you when you are gaming. Is one truly better? The results have changed.

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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.

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On the Intel platform we found 2560x1600 with 2X TR MSAA and 16X AF with the absolute highest in-game settings playable. With the AMD platform we also found the same graphics settings playable, no higher, no lower. The settings we found playable are a bit conservative (as far as raw framerate goes), but entirely necessary.

While the framerates in the game according to FRAPS showed us high numbers, the actual "feel" of the game doesn't correlate to what the framerate says. At times there can be a sluggish feeling, like SLI is loosing some of its efficiency, this usually happens when new areas are loaded in the game and new scenery comes onscreen. While the framerates do not drop to below playable levels the change in framerate is still "felt" and experienced, this change in framerate is distracting.

Therefore in order to minimize this experience you have to try and keep the framerate at a high level, which means not going to 4X AA with this setup, because then the sluggish feeling will become more pronounced. So by leaving the antialiasing setting at 2X the feeling is reduced and bearable for most. If it is not bearable to you, you have two options, turn off AA completely and or lower the grass setting to minimum. Grass seems to make a large impact on performance even with SLI enabled.

We also tried 2X Transparency Supersampling mode in Oblivion. The framerates look high enough in-game to make you think this would be playable, however, there is that same "feeling" of slowdowns from time to time as you enter new areas or encounter new areas that have loaded, so you might experience a slow down, especially with lots of trees or grass on the screen. In some very grassy areas you may see framerates in the mid 20's even at this setting.

TR SSAA does improve image quality on trees and grass, and it is visible in-game at level 2X, so it does improve the gameplay experience, but the brief slowdowns may be distracting to gameplay. So while this setting may be acceptable to some, there are others that it won't be for performance reasons

It almost feels like perhaps more video card RAM would help. Perhaps with 1GB of RAM plus a little faster memory bandwidth TR SSAA would be much more playable at this resolution in Oblivion with SLI

We experienced these same phenomena on the AMD platform as well, so this was definitely not unique to the Intel platform. Though we found the same settings playable on the AMD platform as you can see from the table and graph overall performance was slower. We experienced greater framerate “spikes” in performance as you can see on the graph with the AMD platform. Overall the Intel platform experience was “smoother”. Since however both are at the exact same level of image quality they look exactly the same between them, the only difference is the performance in this game.

Overall some may indeed find 4X AA playable or 2X TR SSAA, but to us this game just simply "feels" better at 2X TR MSAA at 2560x1600 with 16X AF and maximum in-game settings. One thing is for certain, this game is incredibly beautiful at 2560x1600 with 2X AA, HDR and all the in-game settings cranked up.