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Chuck this thang out

You've got an ATI Radeon X1000 Familiy card ? Then you are are da man ! Next up is something for you ATI owners out there. ATI have recently released a patch (called the 'Chuck patch' link) for all X1 series cards to support AA and HDR together in Oblivion. It has been well documented that ATI cards offer the benefit of being capable to run HDR and AA in unison, so the end user no longer as to sacrifice image quality and choose either or. This is a nice advantage over Nvidia, especially for those with Crossfire systems, as these are the setups that will most likely have enough power to render such an intensive scene.

HDR + NO AA (click image to enlarge)	HDR + 4x AA HDR + NO AA (click image to enlarge)

The screenshots above show you the difference between AA and no AA with HDR applied. It really looks fantastic. The shots were taken at a resolution of 1600x1200, so AA isn't as necessary, but it sure makes a difference and it looks amazing having all that eye candy up full. However those of you on 17" TFT's with a native resolution of 1280x1024 and power to spare, will really like the ability to smooth out those jaggies without having to loose HDR in the process. In terms of performance, well, it was better than I expected, but you are definitely going to need crossfire to run this at 1600x1200 or higher. On the Weatherleah test, with the Crossfire enabled Ultra High end rig the minimum FPS dropped about 3fps to around 25 with 4xAA enabled. The average was about 30fps, a drop of about 5fps. It was completely playable, considering this is a very intensive area of the game, and you can expect far higher frame rates else where. This really does show how well ATI's latest hardware handles AA.

As for the overall difference between ATI and Nvidia cards, in terms of performance it was pretty hard to tell in this test due to a lack of a card in the same class from each manufacturer. It would have been nice to see a comparison between a 7900GTX and X1900XTX. I would say however, that I did have a chance for a quick play on a 7900GTX system, although I couldn't produce any concrete results for this review due to time constraints. My very subjective opinion is that the X1900XTX offers a slightly smoother overall experience.

In terms of IQ with every setting maximum HDR on and no AA it really is virtually impossible to tell the difference between an ATI card and an Nvidia one. Which ever card you have you will be impressed with the visuals it produces in this game.

Obviously the one ace ATI has up its sleeve is the ability to render AA as well as HDR, although this requires that you have enough raw power to provide a stable frame rate.