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.

Here's one of the best-respected graphics engines in a game today, replete with FP16-based high dynamic range lighting and lots of nice effects, the winner of our poll on the best-looking PC game—and the GeForce 8800 utterly dominates in it.

I played around with Oblivion a fair amount on the GeForce 8800 cards, and they're not without the visual glitches that tend come with fresh drivers on a new GPU architecture. Some character shadows tend to flicker, there's occasional Z cracking, and every once in a while, a stray miscolored block of pixels pops up somewhere on the screen. These problems are fairly infrequent, though, and I expect them to be fixed in later drivers. Regardless, the game looks absolutely stunning. The texture filtering problems I've noted on the G71 are definitely fixed here. The GeForce 8800's default filtering methods aren't perfect, but they are better than ATI's, which are still pretty good.

I wanted to see what I could do to push the G80 with Oblivion, so I left the game at its "Ultra quality" settings and cranked up the resolution to 2048x1536. I then turned up the quality options in the graphics driver control panel: 4X AA, transparency supersampling, and high-quality texture filtering. I set the Radeon X1950 XTX to comparable settings for comparison, but the GeForce 7900 GTX couldn't join the party, since it can't do FP16 HDR with AA.

The 8800 GTX runs the game at these settings with horsepower to spare! I was still curious about how far I could take things, so I turned on 16X CSAA in addition to everything else, and the 8800 GTX completed our test loop at about 45 frames per second—easily a playable frame rate for this game. Here's a screenshot from that test session:

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.

Once again, the GeForce 8800 cards are beating up on SLI and CrossFire rigs. Yow.