![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Tuesday , February 20, 2007
- Author:
- Mark Warner
- Editor:
- Brent Justice
- Google +1
Sapphire Radeon X1950 GT
Sapphire Technology is the first and only add-in-board partner with a video card using the new ATI Radeon X1950 GT GPU. Does the Radeon X1950 GT have what it takes to run with the big boys? This $150 video card is full of surprises.
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.
In Oblivion, the Sapphire Radeon X1950 GT ran at 1024x768 with generally very high in-game settings. The video card is certainly capable of running at higher resolutions, such as 1280x1024, but only by lowering in-game quality settings. At 1024x768, we were unable to use any level of AA or AF and maintain consistently playable framerates. The fade options were at their maximum settings. Grass was disabled, but internal and external shadows were at their maximum values. Self shadows, because they are practically broken in the game, were disabled, as were grass shadows, since we weren't able to use grass anyways. Tree Canopy Shadows, a very important visual feature of Oblivion, were enabled, and shadow filtering was set to high. HDR was enabled, water detail was high, and ripples and reflections were enabled.
We found that on the NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS the same settings were playable, for the same reasons. This video card is also perfectly able to use 1280x1024, but not without lowering many quality settings. With the GeForce 7900 GS, we were still unable to use any level of AA or AF. The performance hit was just too much to be playable. Both video cards are practically even in this game.
Image Quality
The screenshot above illustrates the fact that these two video cards are very well-matched in both image quality and performance in Oblivion. The two sides look nearly identical, and they had the same exact framerate in that particular scene.