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.

The engine unfortunately has a 60fps cap that we’ve been unable to remove thus far, but even despite this, we believe the test is very relevant. We found that a frame rate above about 40fps delivered an acceptable gaming experience on these cards, but what’s important is the frame rates you’ll see during explosions – pay particular attention to the minimum frame rates, as they will give you an idea how well each graphics card handles an explosion.









Sapphire's ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 2GB starts well in Fallout 3, delivering higher frame rates than Nvidia's GeForce GTX 285 almost right across the board. The only exception is at 1,680 x 1,050 4xAA where it is essentially a dead heat. The gap is much smaller with 4xAA applied, but then increases significantly with 8xAA - at 2,560 x 1,600 8xAA 16xAF, the 4850 X2 is even faster than Nvidia's GeForce GTX 295!

However, it is worth noting that although the GeForce GTX 285 doesn't match the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2's blistering average frame rates, it does deliver higher minimums and that should mean you'll get a smoother gameplay experience. That is especially true if the average is already respectably high (i.e. above 60 frames per second).