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 is varied, and with 8x AA especially NVIDIA seems to have a disadvantage at 2560x1600, but this is mainly due to the limited 512MB graphics memory.

Still we render 39 FPS on average at 1600x1200 with 8x AA enabled, that's pretty frickin' awesome. 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\.