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 settings to "Ultra High Quality." The screen resolution was set to 2560x1600 resolution, with HDR lighting enabled. 16X anisotropic filtering and 4X AA was forced on via the cards' driver control panels. Since the G71 GPU can't do 16-bit floating-point texture filtering and blending in combination with antialiasing, it had to sit out these tests.

Again, the GeForce 8800 GTX doesn't look to need any additional help in order to run a recent game, even one as good-looking as Oblivion, at 2560x1600 resolution. In order to further stress these configs, I turned up the quality levels on everything. All quality sliders in the game were completely maxed out. In the cards' driver control panels, I enabled 8X antialiasing. For the GeForce 8800s, that means 8X coverage sampled AA, and for the Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire, it means 8X Super AA. I also turned on transparency supersampling on the GeForce 8800s and the corresponding high-quality adaptive AA mode on the Radeons, and I set texture filtering to its highest available quality setting. The cards then performed like so:

Push hard enough, and even a GeForce 8800 GTX will start to show signs of stress. With these settings, SLI makes the difference between definitely smooth, playable frame rates and borderline ones. Although, honestly, I think the 8800 GTX feels quite playable in Oblivion at these settings, and if it's a problem, turning down transparency supersampling gets frame rates up to more than acceptable levels.

To give you an idea of the sort of visuals we're talking about, here's a screenshot of an outdoor area in Oblivion loaded with vegetation. I used all of the settings above, except with 16X CSAA to make edges look a little smoother. Dual 8800 GTXs in SLI handle this scene at over 30 FPS.