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.









In Fallout 3, the HIS ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB IceQ4+ Turbo manages to eke out a small advantage over the reference clocked Radeon HD 4870 1GB to the tune of about four percent across the board. You're not going to notice this difference in the real world, frankly. What you will notice though is the advantage the HD 4870 1GB IceQ4+ Turbo has over the similarly-priced GeForce GTX 260-216 graphics card.

At 1,680 x 1,050 8xAA 16xAF, the gap is almost 33 percent and at the same settings but with a 1,920 x 1,200 resolution, there's a similar performance differential - this is, of course, down to the Radeon's superior anti-aliasing performance when 8xMSAA is applied. With 4xAA applied at these resolutions, the gap is much smaller but still significant enough to make a difference in the real world - it's 16 percent faster at 1,680 x 1,050 and over 21 percent quicker at 1,920 x 1,200.