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.






Unlike Crysis, Fallout 3 typically favours the Radeons and at both 1,920 x 1,200 4xAA and 1,680 x 1,050 8xAA, you wouldn’t argue with that, but the Radeon HD 4770 does struggle a little with 8xAA enabled. Not that we didn’t expect that, though. If you move to more reasonable settings that you’re likely to use any of these cards at and the GeForce GTS 250 is the clear leader

It’s abundantly clear that the new Forceware release 185 betas are doing a sterling job, as the GTS 250 is a massive eight frames per second faster than the Radeon HD 4850. The difference between the 4850 and the new 4770 is quite small though – there’s just a few frames per second in it – and so it looks like AMD’s new mid-range part might make the 4850 look like pretty poor value for money.