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.









At 1,920 x 1,200 8xAA 16xAF, the Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB Toxic is being faster than all of Nvidia's single GPU offerings when it comes to average frame rates, but its minimum frame rate is four frames per second lower than what the GeForce GTX 285 1GB delivers in our manual run through. You will, therefore, get a slightly smoother gameplay experience on the GeForce GTX 285, because its minimum frame rate doesn't drop down below 25 frames per second at any point.

The improvement the Sapphire offers over a stock Radeon HD 4870 1GB equates to around five percent in terms of average frame rate and there's no increase in minimums - memory bandwidth doesn't appear to be a limitation at this particular setting. At higher resolutions and settings, the increased memory bandwidth does make a difference, but you're likely to be considering a faster graphics card than this if you're driving a 30-inch display at its native resolution.