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.










Generally speaking, Nvidia’s hardware fares better than AMD’s in this particular title – especially when you take the minimum frame rates into account. What’s evident here though is that all of the cards we’ve tested here are able to play Fallout 3 particularly well as long as anti-aliasing isn’t turned on – even the GeForce 9800 GTX+ and Radeon HD 4850 512MB can deliver great frame rates at 2,560 x 1,600 with 0xAA.

However, because of the game is set in a ruined city, anti-aliasing really makes a difference to the overall gaming experience – we’d go so far as to say that lots of AA is almost a requirement. Without AA enabled, the skyline is marred by jaggy edges that really detract from the game’s immersive surroundings and it’s AA that separates the men from the boys.

Fallout 3 is another game where memory seems to make a difference, but it’s not quite as profound as what we saw in Far Cry 2, where even at low resolutions there was a significant performance difference. Here, it doesn’t seem to make a big difference until you turn 8xAA on or when you’re playing the game at 2,560 x 1,600 with at least some AA turned on.