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.









Fallout 3 favours ATI hardware, though doesn't really care whether that hardware has 1GB or 2GB of memory until you hit 2,650 x 1,600. At the resolutions below that, the Sapphire Vapor-X more or less matches the HD 4870 1GB for speed, with only fractions of 1fps between the two.

At 2,560 x 1,600 the story changes, and the extra frame buffer on the Vapor-X makes a difference. When using 4x AA, the minimum for the Vapor-X was 22fps to the stuttery 18fps of the HD 4870 1GB. Stressing the frame buffer even more with 8x AA, the Vapor-X is even faster than the 1GB HD 4870; the Vapor-X achieved a minimum of 19fps and an average of 47.1fps to the 14fps minimum and 46.1fps average of the HD 4870.

The performance at 2,560 x 1,600 with 8x AA puts the Vapor-X ahead of Nvidia's £286 GeForce GTX 285, which is good going for this £220 card. However, this is of little appeal to most people - if you've got a 30in screen and want 8x AA in Fallout 3 you'll need to spend more than £220 (and possibly even £285) on your graphics to get a truly playable frame rate.