Fallout 4

Publisher: Bethesda Softworks

From our Fallout 4 review:

'In both theme and structure Fallout 4 is very similar to 3. The dangerous wastes of the commonwealth wrap around Boston's skyscrapers like an exclusion zone around a leaking reactor, and the eerie juxtaposition of post-apocalyptic horror with 1950s' optimism is threaded through with references to America's emergent history, though this time the focus is on revolution and abolitionism, rather than Fallout 3's deconstruction of Washington's political infrastructure.

Bethesda counter these similarities by giving Fallout 4 a much more vibrant aesthetic. Gone are the Instagram-filtered tones of Fallout 3, replaced with a colour palette that better reflects how light works. During the day, the Wasteland is remarkably bright and colourful, from the garish scarlet outline of a Red Rocket gas station, to the motley tarpaulins and neon signage of Diamond City, Boston's central urban hub. At night, those colours fade away to a moody blue, and it's then you start to feel the ghosts of the apocalypse around you - the stillness of the air, the cracked roads and crumbling buildings, the dozens of pre-war skeletons scattered about like children's toys, twisted and broken. The mannequins -oh god the mannequins - standing in dusty corners and shattered shop-fronts, always staring, always judging.'



Our Fallout 4 benchmark is a 30-second FRAPS recording of a manual playthrough, where our character runs forward through a woodland area just outside the Corvega Automation Plant. The scene is very challenging relative to the rest of the game, with massive draw distances and complex volumetric lighting. This means the results below are not representative of typical gameplay, but rather of the most challenging points in the game. We test at the game's 'Ultra' preset, the highest available, and v-sync is disabled in the game's .ini file.

Crysis 3

Publisher: EA

Mixing the open-world combat of Crysis with the more tightly scripted urban jungle of Crysis 2, Crysis 3 is a smorgasbord of visual effects and polygons galore. With DirectX 11 support, high resolution textures and incredibly detailed characters models, it's laid down the gauntlet for the next generation of consoles and games alike when it comes to gorgeous graphics

We test using the Very High detail preset and with Very High texture resolution. lens flare and motion blur are both enabled, although due to its heavy performance impact, anti-aliasing is disabled.

As explained earlier, we use a custom macro-driven 60 seconds play-through from the single player mission Red Star Rising. The 60 seconds of gameplay takes place in a large open environment heavy on water and particle effects. Each test is repeated three times, with the average result taken.

Unigine Valley 1.0 Benchmark

Publisher: Unigine

Unigine's free Valley 1.0 benchmarking tool works well as a graphics benchmark as it is GPU limited and is thus incredibly taxing on the GPU whilst placing the CPU under very little stress. Unigine's scoring system is effectively linear: a card with 2,000 points is considered twice as fast as one with 1,000 points, and half as fast as one with 4,000 points.