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 is one of the bigger titles released in a long time. We measure with no less than 8x AA enabled, a mode that the Radeon card absolutely manages the best. Again a lead for the 5850 over the GTX 285.

Look at CrossfireX... see that flat line? We ran into a bottleneck there, the 3.75 GHz clocked Core i7 965 processor isn't coping with it any longer. Well, let's reverse that, we just have too much GPU horsepower under the hood for this game title.

So even with 8x AA enabled we see roughly 66 frames per second rendered at 1920x1200. Once we pass the 90 FPS marker, we see CPU bottlenecks on several cards/setups.