Oblivion is a very beautiful and visually striking game. Morrowind was one of the first games to feature support for Programmable Pixel Shaders in the game engine. Oblivion takes the beautiful water and adds shaders to every surface, every detail, every character. Examples of Pixel Shaders are found in the water, which is now translucent like the water found in Futuremark’s 3DMark05 Mother Nature demo. Another area where Pixel Shaders are used is in the skin of the NPCs interact with. Realistic skin tones abound throughout the game.

The buildings in the game are simply breathtaking in some respects. The castles in the towns have ramparts, halls and ornate decorations on the side. Churches have stained glass windows that show dust particles when the sun hits the window. The interior and exterior of some of the locations have to be seen to be believed. Weather effects are present throughout the game. Rain, snow, and fog, are all present. Night turns into day into afternoon into night.

The facial animation in the game uses Vertex Shaders. The characters speak and the lips move in a realistic way in sync with the voices. In many instances the faces will roll the eyes and look around while speaking to the player. It’s a bit disconcerting to see the NPC look around while talking about something of vital importance to your quest.

Bethsheda Soft decided to use a lot of HDR in every facet of the game. Realistic lighting is the trademark of HDR which compensates for the limited range of lighting contrasts that a modern monitor can display. HDR lighting can be enabled by the game setup. One thing that ATI cards can do that NVIDIA cards cannot is HDR+MultiSample Anti-Aliasing at the same time. ATI released a “Chuck Driver that enables it. Without the Chuck driver you can’t enable both at the same time on the X1K series.

The sound in the game is excellent. The voice acting in the game is varied from Patrick Stewart voicing the King Uriel Septim to various people doing voices from the lowly peasant to the Countess. As you move along with armor on clangs echo across the floor. If you’re underwater you hear noises. If you’re fighting a soldier the sound effect of sword hitting sword is extremely realistic. As you’re walking around a town or city you’re likely to hear ordinary conversation between townspeople furthering the story. Also if you bump into a character, you’ll hear a “excuse me”. If you get caught stealing, you’ll hear a “Stop Thief!!”