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. We measure with 8xAA enabled, and that particular settings always did benefit the ATI cards somehow. NVIDIA got a lot closer though with the help of some driver optimizations.

Even with a sub-100 USD graphics card we can apparently enable 8x AA up to 1920x1200. I'm not sure what you are thinking, but that's just incredible bang for buck. And sure, at 2560x1600 we run into all kinds of limitations and bottlenecks. But I assume that if you play your games at that resolution... you'd have opted for some more raw horsepower under that graphics card hood anyway.