VGA performance: Fallout 3 (DX9)

Fallout 3

You know, its been a decade since the last Fallout release, and a lot has happened since then. Fallout 3 takes place roughly two-hundred years after a nuclear war devastated the planet. While the series originally started in Southern California, this time around youll find yourself in a post-apocalyptic Washington D.C., better known as the Capital Wasteland. You are a resident of Vault 101, one of a series of fallout vaults built to protect its inhabitants from the harsh conditions in the wasteland. As the story goes, in Vault 101, nobody enters - and nobody leaves. Raised as a child in the vault, the game begins with you as a young lad learning to take your first steps and continues as you grow older (this portion of the game is used as both a training mission and to build an affinity with your character). It isnt until you wake up one day to find the vault in chaos - your father has somehow left and its up to you to follow him into the wasteland - where the story really begins.

Fallout 3 is an immersive, graphically stunning title with that awesome movie feel. Easily one of the best games of 2008, a must buy Gurus... a must buy.

Image quality

• 8x AA
• HDR enabled
• Detail level: Ultra

Fallout 3 then. The results are a little jumpy if you look at the chart. Initially NVIDIA would have had a pretty good advantage here, but ATI's Catalyst 8.12 drivers boosted overall Radeon series 4000 performance pretty significantly.

As a result the performance isn't leading in this benchmark and especially with 8x AA, NVIDIA seems to have a slight disadvantage at 2560x1600.

For those interested in testing the game with FRAPs and learning how to disable the framerate cap:

force the cap off by setting iPresentInterval=0 in both Fallout.ini and FalloutPrefs.ini located in User\Documents\My Games\Fallout 3\.