Fallout 3

Publisher: Bethesda

Fallout 3 is the revival of Interplay’s excellent Fallout series of games following many years out of the limelight. It’s developed and published by Bethesda and, judging by the success of the game, we’ll be seeing more Fallout games in the future.

Despite using the Oblivion engine which is now a few years old, the game looks absolutely stunning. Bethesda has spiced up the graphics a bit since Oblivion and has extended the engine – there are some great explosions, soft shadows and smoke effects that are particularly noteworthy.

We tested the game by manually playing a section of the game that incorporates a number of explosions and effects that you’re likely to experience during your time in post-apocalyptic Washington DC. We recorded the frame rate using FRAPS.

The in-game details were set to their highest values and both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were controlled by the application settings instead of through the driver control panel. This meant that transparency anti-aliasing was enabled, along with HDR and all of the cool smoke effects.

Fallout 3’s engine is by default capped to 60 frames per second, which can make benchmark results very unclear, especially when testing at lower resolutions or with high end graphics cards. To remove the 60FPS cap you’ll need to find the Fallout3.ini file in \Documents\My Games\Fallout3 and edit the file so that iPresentInterval=0. This removes the frame rate cap, and allows us to get a much better idea of a card’s abilities.









The GeForce GTX 295 starts out really well in Fallout 3, sitting right up there with the GeForce GTX 280 SLI configuration right until the final hurdle, where it falls in rather spectacular fashion. It ends up being no faster than our GeForce GTX 260+ SLI setup at 2,560 x 1,600 8xAA 16xAF and the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 is a massive 52 percent faster.

This is a little disappointing if we're honest because it has proven our initial feelings on the previous page exactly right. At high resolutions where lots of memory bandwidth is required, this card isn't going to be much faster than even a pair of original GeForce GTX 260 cards in SLI - the ones with 192 stream processors.

Of course, the GeForce GTX 280 SLI is much more expensive than the $499 Nvidia is planning to ship the GeForce GTX 295 at, but the gulf in performance is pretty dramatic. When we asked Nvidia about this again (our initial thoughts about the architecture were done before all of our testing was completed), the company said that while this scenario is memory bandwidth limited, future games will benefit from more shader horsepower.

That's definitely true if past experience continues into the future, but it's something that the company is looking to better optimise in the run up to the release - the gap between the GeForce GTX 280 SLI setup and GeForce GTX 295 "is a bit high," said Nvidia.