![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Monday , September 17, 2007
- Author:
- Mark Warner
- Editor:
- Brent Justice
- Google +1
MSI NX8800 Ultra OC Edition
MSI's overclocked GeForce 8800 Ultra features the highest clock speeds and lowest price of any air-cooled GeForce 8800 Ultra on the market. Is that enough to counteract the high price of the Ultra GPU?
The Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles
(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.
The Shivering Isles is the first official expansion pack for Oblivion. With more than 30 hours of new content, it adds a whole new area and a slew of new quests, characters, monsters and equipment. The new area is slightly less graphically intensive as the classic Oblivion content, so players that currently enjoy Oblivion with good performance should not need to lower their playable settings to experience the expansion pack.
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.
Both the MSI NX8800 Ultra OC Edition and the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX had ample performance to enable us to run with maximum in-game settings in Oblivion. We did, however, disable self-shadows because self-shadows in Oblivion are essentially broken thanks to a game bug. They flicker and they are just plain distracting. The game is better experienced without them, in our opinion. Neither of these video cards had any performance trouble while running with self-shadows turned on, so those of you who don’t mind the flickering will have the performance capacity to enable them.
In addition to maximum in-game quality settings, both of these video cards also allowed us to enabled 4X TR MSAA and 16X AF in the NVIDIA Control Panel. The average performance difference between them was just 3.5 frames per second. But you can see in the graph that for the most part the Ultra is providing higher performance, it just was hard to actually feel in the game.
Image Quality
The above screenshot comparison illustrated the fact that both of these video cards provided us with what amounts to the same gameplay experience.
24" Widescreen Gaming (16:10)
When we increased the resolution to 1920x1200 from 1600x1200, we did not experience a significant enough performance penalty to require is to lower our playable settings. The game remained firmly playable and there was merely a slight reduction in framerates. Image quality was still as good as it gets, and in Oblivion, that means it was excellent.
After we found performance to be so good at this higher resolution, we revisited our playable settings at 1600x1200 to see if we could improve upon them, and check to see if there was, perhaps, something we overlooked. However, all we could do was to increase the AA setting, and that resulted in the game becoming too choppy to be playable. Using either 8X TR MSAA or 4X TR SSAA, framerates were too low and there was an unacceptable amount of input lag. Therefore our highest playable settings at 1920x1200 were still 4X TR MSAA and 16X AF which looked fantastic.
Image Quality
Here again, the screenshot above shows the general lack of any difference at all in image quality, and by extension, the Oblivion experience.