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 is a rare game in that it heavily tests both a GPU's core speed and memory bandwidth, with higher memory clocks leading to improved average frame rates and improved core speeds upping the minimum frame rate when things get graphically intense during explosions. Lucky then that the Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 1GB Atomic packs improvements to both, and the effect is clear, with the increased memory speed resulting in between five and 10 per cent increases in average frame rates and the increased core upping minimum frame rates by up to 20 per cent! However, when using 8xAA, there's little or no improvement in minimum frame rates, with the bottleneck obviously elsewhere.

This makes the Atomic comfortably the fastest single GPU card in Fallout 3, beating both the GTX 285 and GTX 275 competition at every resolution and anti aliasing setting.