Oblivion

We’ll just come right out and say it: If Oblivion had some built in way of playing back demos or even a specialized benchmarking application, it would be the end-all ideal tool for benchmarking. The game itself on high settings is incredibly taxing on even the most capable systems. On low details the game chugs away and is clearly CPU limited on the high end. When you set the detail settings in Oblivion to Ultra Low, the game looks pretty bad. This is good if you want to see the difference a faster processor can make. Our benchmarking for this game consisted of running through the same path outside of the first castle and recording the results with FRAPS. We performed each test 5 times because we discovered that this method, though probably the only good method, was prone to far more of the FPS anomalies we mentioned earlier.




As you can see, with the game on Ultra Low details, the X6800 outperforms the E6700 by a good 10 FPS. However, when the game details are set to medium, we can see that it becomes more dependent on the graphics card. When we turn the settings up to Ultra High (which, by the way, turns Oblivion into easily the most graphically impressive game we’ve ever played), all bets are off.