Oblivion undoubtedly is one of the most stressing game titles of 2006 and can effectively stress every component in a system. Indeed, since the game provides a decent challenge to even the most high-end of cards, we were eager to see how it would perform with the older AGP interface and cards.

The test lasted for a total of 30 seconds. Our game was patched to version 1.1 in Italian, and we placed all quality settings at the highest possible, save for HDR which we left disabled. We ran tests at 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 with 4xAA and 16x anisotropic filtering.

Unfortunately Oblivion created a problem for us in our testing because the game doesn’t come with a built-in benchmarking utility. This means we had to resort to using FRAPS, which made it much harder to maintain consistency between tests. We attempted to recreate the same test on each card exactly the same way; however, there might have been slight differences from card to card.

Again, we see a continuation of the pattern we’ve been seeing where the X1950PRO cards all perform very similar to each other. The margin of difference between the cards is very slight, and for the most part negligible. This means that both AGP and PCI Express versions of the X1950PRO perform practically the same as each other.

Increasing the resolution places more emphasis on memory size and it is only natural to see the 512MB Sapphire X1950PRO AGP top our charts. Right behind the importance of memory for high resolutions comes clock speed, and so naturally the factory overclocked HIS Radeon X1950PRO AGP came in second, topping out all PCI Express counterparts.

Final Words

What we’ve been seeing so far in our tests is quite interesting. For the most part, the Sapphire X1950PRO 512MB AGP has been dominating the results, and is offering quite solid performance. From what we have been seeing, the use of PCI Express isn’t making much of a performance difference so far. We still admit, though, that the number of benchmarks in the first part of this article isn’t enough to effectively draw a conclusion. Part two of this article, which will be published tomorrow, will include additional tests including Half Life 2 Episode 1/Lost Coast, Prey, X3 Reunion, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, Serious Sam 2, noise, temperature, and power tests. We will also state our complete observations then.