The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered is a fascinating idea: to bring the original game engine to the modern era, with strategic changes made to gameplay – but with the lion’s share of the actual remastering handled by an Unreal Engine 5 wrapper. The concept is nothing new, of course. We’ve seen it work out beautifully in a game like Bluepoint’s Shadow of the Colossus and we’ve seen it work less than optimally in something like the Grand Theft Auto Trilogy Definitive Edition. Bethesda Game Studios’ collaboration works in the context of delivering a fully modernised take on the classic original, but problems from the original game persist into the remaster, while performance overall has massive, highly distracting problems. You may be fine with that if you’re OK with the ‘jank’ historically connected to BGS games, but we are not.
From a video perspective, Digital Foundry has already delivered its first offering – a new episode of one of our favourite recurring series, the PC retro time capsule. Here, we played the beginnings of Oblivion Remastered using both 2025 and OG 2006 code. Today’s RTX 5090 running the game maxed at 4K resolution is stacked up against the launch version of the original Oblivion running on a Pentium D paired with a Radeon X1800 XT. In a 52-minute episode, you get to appreciate the extent of the remastering work by seeing just how far gaming graphics have come in the last 19 years.
The limited polygon budgets, basic effects and lighting struggle to produce some kind of approximation of a real world – which proves to be computationally challenging even on what was considered to be high-end hardware way back when. My playthrough on the original game falls short of John Linneman’s experience on the remastered version by just about every measurable criteria. All of Unreal Engine 5’s effects – Nanite virtual geometry, Lumen global illumination and virtual shadow maps are deployed, delivering a far more realistic, appealling world. With that said though, there does seem to be something ‘off’ about the lighting: the radical transformation here is perhaps that one step too far away from the remarkable ambience of the original. Performance is highly variable, stutter is commonplace, and looking at John’s matching gameplay in the new version, I had my concerns.
Once I went hands-on with the new version, these concerns turned out to be well founded – there are severe problems here that must be addressed. When The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion launched in 2006, it challenged PC hardware with its big open world and shader model three graphics – but the game’s performance characteristics have been largely forgotten today. Go back and play it on period-appropriate hardware and it’s easy to see that Oblivion had its own stuttering problems. Walking around the game world induced big stutters each and every time a new world grid would load and deload in front and behind the player. History repeats itself with this week’s brand-new remaster – and it’s perhaps one of the worst-running games I’ve ever tested for Digital Foundry.