Graphics Presets

Now, we get to the graphics and we take a look at what users can expect the game to look like on their own systems.

Fallout 3 is, as most of you will probably know, built on the Oblivion engine. The engine has been enhanced, tweaked and rejigged since Oblivion's debut, but you can still see some similarities here and there.

Take a close look at the NPCs, for example. Their models are pretty similar to those used in Oblivion, as is the way that conversations are presented in that they stand in front of you and talk while everything in the background fades into the depth of field and surrenders to the blur.

Of course, there were some areas of Oblivion that were a bit disappointing graphically, such as the land textures in the distance and the amount of pop-up on some items, like trees. Thus, to try and get an idea of how Fallout 3 has improved over Oblivion, we’ll look at the different graphical options – starting with the presets.


There are four options for the graphical presets in Fallout 3, all of which are unfortunately inaccessible from within the game itself. Instead, they have to be tweaked before the game is started via a configuration utility. It’s a slight pain, but does let you have a lot more options for adjusting the game's performance. The four settings are Ultra High, High, Medium and Low.

Above, you can see the two highest settings, Ultra High and High. These are what you should really be hoping to achieve on a high-end system and, with a Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 in a system with 3.5GB of accessible RAM we were able to play the game on Ultra High with no performance drops.

On these settings above, the game looks as good as it can, which is pretty damned good! If you click to see the larger images you’ll see that there’s a fair bit of detail even in the distance and that the corpses we’ve draped over the tables and dumpsters in the foreground still have a lot of detail, if not their skulls. The scene may be brown, but the blur effects and HDR keep it looking fresh and vibrant.


On the next two settings, which are visible in the second set of pictures above, the game doesn’t fare too well visually. The HDR and blur effects that made the game look so pretty start to drain away and the screen quickly turns from hues of autumnal brown to shades of cigarette ash grey.

Detail in the distance also starts to drop off, and some items and objects are starting to get turned off, such as the chair on top of the billboard. On these settings you'll also start seeing a lot more pop-up, especially on grass and bush items. If you look at the enlarged image for the lowest quality setting then you'll see that even the corpses draped on the table in left of the scene are getting cropped out of view. The textures also take a hit, as does the anti-aliasing. The edges of items start to look very rough and jagged, as you can see around the edges of the cars.

Granted, on the Low setting the game is still good looking enough to be playable on a laptop or such, but it’s not something you should really want to aim for on a PC. Upgrades aren’t all that expensive, y’know?