The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
We tested Oblivion by manually playing through a specific point in the game five times while recording frame rates using the FRAPS utility. Each gameplay sequence lasted 60 seconds. This method has the advantage of simulating real gameplay quite closely, but it comes at the expense of precise repeatability. We believe five sample sessions are sufficient to get reasonably consistent and trustworthy results. In addition to average frame rates, we've included the low frames rates, because those tend to reflect the user experience in performance-critical situations. In order to diminish the effect of outliers, we've reported the median of the five low frame rates we encountered.

We set Oblivion's graphical quality settings to "Ultra High." The screen resolution was set to 1600x1200 resolution, with HDR lighting enabled. 16X anisotropic filtering was forced on via the cards' driver control panels.

Oblivion isn't really a twitch action game, for the most part, so you might get away with running at Ultra Quality and 1600x1200, as we did for this test. I'd probably drop down to a lower resolution or quality setting with the X1900 GT, though. The GeForce 7900 GS is in the same boat, with slightly lower average and minimum frame rates than the X1900 GT.

Fortunately, having a Radeon gives you better options on the quality front. I've mentioned it before, but it holds true for the X1900 GT: the ATI cards' visuals simply look better in this game thanks to a superior anisotropic filtering algorithm that produces less texture sparkle, moire, and other forms of high-frequency noise, especially on the cobblestone streets of the city. This difference isn't so apparent in every area of every game, but it was pronounced in our experience with Oblivion. The Radeon X1000 series can also run this game with both high-dynamic-range lighting (a must to get Oblivion's full visual impact) and edge antialiasing enabled, thanks to a patched version of ATI's drivers. Due to certain hardware limitations, current GeForce 7-series cards cannot.

Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
We tested GRAW with FRAPS, as well. We cranked up all of the quality settings for this game, with the exception of antialiasing. However, GRAW doesn't allow cards with 256MB of memory to run with its highest texture quality setting, so those cards were all running at the game's "Medium" texture quality.

The X1900 GT matches the GeForce 7900 GS step for step once again. Running GRAW at 1280x1024 with these quality settings is asking a bit much from the X1900 GT, but the same is true of the 7900 GS.