Game:

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006)

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REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 16:9 ASPECT RATIO. Commentary subtitles are available!

Today it's finally time to look at how The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Bethesda Softworks, 2006) runs on high-end computer parts from around mid-to-late Q3 2005. While the ATi Radeon X1900XT/XTX already existed on market by the time Oblivion came out, the GeForce 7800GTX was by no means a bad GPU during the game's release. Likewise, the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ was certainly good enough at handling Oblivion's more CPU-limited scenarios (aside from maybe large-scale item duplication), with the 4800+ still being the fastest X2 product prior to Oblivion's release (only bested by the Athlon 64 FX series processors).

How is the performance on this PC?
Oblivion was notorious for its ability to stress the best GPUs in early 2006 and this footage is evidence of that. It certainly runs more than OK across the board, in my opinion. However, it is not a perfectly smooth ride, which perhaps doesn't matter as much in a single-player game primarily about melee combat and spell-casting but the performance drops are noticeable. The general rule appears to be that any workload involving a lot of on-screen characters, alpha textures (foliage mostly) or effects that require multiple iterations of shader code (such as the HDR lighting, Shadow Mapping, refractive glass/haze surfaces or Shadows On Grass) will cause a much greater hit on performance than simply having a higher level-of-detail (LOD) or geometry count for the environment.

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Operating system: Microsoft Windows XP SP3
Drivers for GeForce 7800 GTX: ForceWare 78.01 (August 2nd 2005).
Drivers for Sound Blaster Audigy 2: October 31st 2003 EAX 4.0 drivers.

This footage and audio was captured from the following computer:
Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI (Socket 939) motherboard (manufactured somewhere in early 2005, I forget when exactly)
nVidia NForce4 SLI chipset
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (ADA4800DAA6CD) 2.4 GHz dual-core processor (manufactured in early May 2005; week 18 or 19 2005, I forget)
nVidia GeForce 7800 GTX (256MB) graphics card (board manufactured week 25 2005, serial number dates it to somewhere in July 2005)
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 (SB0240) sound card (manufactured when ??? Probably 2003 or 2004 ??? Need to check soon)
2GB of DDR SDRAM; Corsair XMS Pro TwinX1024-3200XLPRO (2x512MB, manufactured week 28 2004) and XMS Platinum TwinX1024-3200XLPT (2x512MB, manufactured week 39 2004), clock speed is DDR400 & latency is 2-2-2-5-2T

The capturing was done with VCS (which can be found on the Internet Archive) and OBS Studio using a Datapath VisionRGB-E1S PCI-Express capture card. A DVI cable is connected between the source computer and the Datapath capture card to enable video capturing. Audio capture was done by feeding a 3.5mm stereo jack cable from the sound card of the vintage computer to the capture system’s on-board line in connector. Resizing/upscaling of the raw original 1280x720 capture to 3840x2160 was done using VirtualDub2.

TIMESTAMPZ
0:00 - Title screen
0:16 - Video settings
0:30 - Imperial City Prison
3:28 - Exiting sewers/Vilverin
4:59 - Imperial City Market District
6:36 - Pell’s Gate (Shadows on Grass stress test)
8:03 - Cheydinhal
10:23 - Skingrad
12:41 - Kvatch/Oblivion gate
15:10 - The Gold Coast (foliage stress test)
16:26 - [Oblivion being Oblivion]
17:27 - Haha

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