GeForce GTX 275 review | test - VGA performance: Fallout 3 (DX9)

Fallout 3

You know, it’s 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 you’ll 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 isn’t until you wake up one day to find the vault in chaos - your father has somehow left and it’s 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 8x AA 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. However, the new Radeon HD 4890 competes really well.

As a result we see the Radeon HD 4890 win from the GeForce GTX 275. The fun thing is, would we have measured at 4x AA the results would be much closer, and perhaps even in favor the GTX 275. But at 8x AA ATI seems to have the upper hand.

But if you look at the GTX 275, fact remains that at 2560x1600 you'll still have a framerate budget of 38 FPS on average at your disposal, which certainly does not suck.

Alright one more, here we back up that statement. See how the entire dynamic changes and the GeForce GTX 275 crawls ahead? This is Fallout 3 performance measured at 4x AA, otherwise it uses the same settings.