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.









The BFG Tech GeForce GTX 285 OCX is faster than Zotac's GTX 285 AMP! Edition right across the board. The difference is generally a small one between these cards, but there's a nice increase in performance between the reference GTX 285 and BFG's OCX version. This difference equates to around six percent when the game is GPU limited.

The most interesting result we recorded was at 2,560 x 1,600 8xAA 16xAF, where the memory bandwidth limitations of the GeForce GTX 260-216 SLI and GTX 295 shows up. The BFG Tech GeForce GTX 285 OCX is faster than the former, and only a few percentage points slower than the latter. Disappointingly though for BFG Tech, Sapphire's ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 2GB is faster right across the board in this test and it's over £100 cheaper!