Oblivion
Since the day it was released, Oblivion remains unparalleled when it comes to drawing huge forests and lush fields. Those who spent considerable time playing the game and didn't get totally absorbed will have noticed that framerate fluctuation is apparent depending on the location. While this isn't all that important when the framerates hover around 50, it becomes critical on lower end cards such as the ones we are reviewing today. For that reason we decided to do out testing in two very different areas of the game. The first one was the Great Forest, an area known to bring the framerates down with dense foliage. Our second area was a godforsaken path in the icy north of the map, where as luck would have it snowing is an everyday occurrence. With barely no flora the framerates are a lot better there.
Looking at the Great Forest results, it is not hard to see that all three cards have some considerable trouble displaying the majestic world of Oblivion. The champion is once again the XFX card – the relatively fast shader clock is definitely doing its job. The ATI card and the Zotac 8400 are left behind, though it has to be said that the gameplay experience with the HD2400 was by far the smoothest we experienced, even when compared to the XFX card. The higher minimum framerate value confirms this.
In the icy north things didn’t change much, but at least two of the three cards finally managed to deliver a playable framerate. The Zotac card’s minimum value remained below 10, which was painfully obvious when moving around. It should be noted that in both cases turning HDR off scored about 2 extra frames per second. We tried using AA, but after experiencing the slideshow where all the cards could barely push above 15fps we decided to drop the idea.
