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.
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ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB
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ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 2GB
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MSI GeForce GTX 280 HydroGen
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BFG GeForce GTX 280 H2OC
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ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB
-
Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 1GB
-
Nvidia Geforce GTX 260+ 896MB
-
Nvidia Geforce 9800 GTX+ 512MB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB
Frames per second
-
ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 2GB
-
MSI GeForce GTX 280 HydroGen
-
BFG GeForce GTX 280 H2OC
-
ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB
-
Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 1GB
-
Nvidia Geforce GTX 260+ 896MB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB
-
Nvidia Geforce 9800 GTX+ 512MB
Frames per second
-
ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 2GB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB
-
MSI GeForce GTX 280 HydroGen
-
BFG GeForce GTX 280 H2OC
-
ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB
-
Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 1GB
-
Nvidia Geforce GTX 260+ 896MB
-
Nvidia Geforce 9800 GTX+ 512MB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB
Frames per second
-
ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 2GB
-
MSI GeForce GTX 280 HydroGen
-
BFG GeForce GTX 280 H2OC
-
Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 1GB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB
-
Nvidia Geforce GTX 260+ 896MB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB
-
Nvidia Geforce 9800 GTX+ 512MB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB
Frames per second
-
ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 2GB
-
BFG GeForce GTX 280 H2OC
-
MSI GeForce GTX 280 HydroGen
-
ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB
-
Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 1GB
-
Nvidia Geforce GTX 260+ 896MB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB
-
Nvidia Geforce 9800 GTX+ 512MB
Frames per second
-
ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 2GB
-
MSI GeForce GTX 280 HydroGen
-
BFG GeForce GTX 280 H2OC
-
Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 1GB
-
Nvidia Geforce GTX 260+ 896MB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB
-
Nvidia Geforce 9800 GTX+ 512MB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB
Frames per second
-
ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB
-
BFG GeForce GTX 280 H2OC
-
MSI GeForce GTX 280 HydroGen
-
Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 1GB
-
Nvidia Geforce GTX 260+ 896MB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 2GB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB
-
Nvidia Geforce 9800 GTX+ 512MB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB
Frames per second
-
ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 2GB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB
-
BFG GeForce GTX 280 H2OC
-
MSI GeForce GTX 280 HydroGen
-
Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 1GB
-
Nvidia Geforce GTX 260+ 896MB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB
-
ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB
-
Nvidia Geforce 9800 GTX+ 512MB
Frames per second
It's clear from our results here that
Fallout 3, unlike
Far Cry 2 or
Crysis, is more dependant on the GPU core clock than the shader or memory, and the MSI GeForce GTX 280 HydroGen is able to exploit this and take a clear frame rate lead over the BFG GeForce GTX 280 H₂OC in almost every test. It's not until we start enabling anti aliasing at the highest resolutions that the BFG card is able to use its higher memory clock muscle to retake the lead, although both card show clear frame rate improvements over the stock card.
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