The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Performance Guides

Both AnandTech and Firing Squad have written up new performance guides for Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The article at AnandTech focuses on getting the most out of your graphics card:

While we’ve been used to running high end SLI setups at 3MP resolutions and still getting reasonable frame rates in games, the same is not true for Oblivion. In fact, there isn’t a single GPU or pair of GPUs today that will run Oblivion at 1600 x 1200 with everything turned on smoothly. Our highest end X1900 XT CrossFire setup can’t even run our most stressful real world Oblivion test at 1280 x 1024 with all of the detail settings set to their highest values. That’s right, $1200 worth of GPUs will get you less than 50 fps at less than the highest image quality, and we’re not talking about having AA enabled either.

And the article at Firing Squad offers some test results for how the game plays on single and dual-core Athlon 64 processors:

The #1 question we’ve received when it comes to CPU performance with Oblivion is without a doubt if dual-core processors are capable of outperforming older single-core processors in this game. And if so, by how much? Bethesda has already gone on record stating that the game would take advantage of dual-core while it was still in development, and we’ve all seen by now how much Quake 4 benefits from dual-core processors, so everyone’s been eager to see if Oblivion yields similar performance improvements with multi-core CPUs.