Oblivion

Until a couple of days ago we would probably have said that Oblivion was the most graphically impressive game out there. The HDR effect on rocks under a monitor’s native resolution is enough to drop jaws as it is, so adding in all of the other environmental effects available in the game makes for one hell of a combination. The massive open spaces and generally beautiful environment the game offers impressed us enough to work the game into our testing suite, and those characteristics are what keep it on the list today. In this game we would expect the added memory on the Diamond Viper Radeon HD2900 XT 1024MB card to yield some sort of performance improvement over its predecessors.


Not only does the 8800GTX, NVIDIA’s second tier GPU, beat all R600 offerings across the board in Oblivion, the game seemingly doesn’t take a liking to CrossFire. In all cases, performance decreased when CrossFire was enabled on the Radeon HD 2900 cards. Performance throughout the testing, however, was exceptional. In no instance did the FPS drop below acceptable values (lowest recorded value in fraps was 43 FPS). Regardless of the exceptional performance with all cards, we can safely chalk up another win here for the NVIDIA’s G80.

F.E.A.R.

When F.E.A.R. debuted in 2005, nobody really played it. This may have been largely due to the fact all new franchises take a while to be adopted in the gaming community. We suspect, however, that most gamers at the time didn’t have anywhere near the graphics horsepower required to pump this game out at playable framerates with any kind of worthwhile quality settings. Things changed real quickly throughout 2006, as processor advances from Intel and scheduled GPU refreshes by both NVIDIA and AMD finally afforded gamers with some hardware that could run the game with real competence. Flash forward to now, and we are blessed with gaming hardware that barely breaks a sweat when showing this game in maximum detail at high resolutions. Still, F.E.A.R. is one of the most visually unique games in our testing arsenal, and until an update to it or a similar game comes along to take its place, it’s not going anywhere.


Here we very clearly have a game that takes kindly to CrossFire. Performance in CrossFire mode somehow more than doubled our single card numbers. If you are looking for an explanation for this, you most assuredly won’t be finding one here, as we have absolutely no concrete idea on how this could be possible. One theory that we have is that the increased graphics memory, combined with the obvious increase in graphics horsepower afforded by two cards, somehow worked together in a synergistic reaction to get these scores. That is one possible explanation – but we prefer the one where Batman swooped in and changed the numbers when we weren’t looking. While the single-card performance of the HD 2900 series is less than that of the 8800GTX or 8800 Ultra, CrossFire virtually levels the playing field with two 8800 Ultras in SLI.