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

• 4x AA
• HDR enabled
• Detail level: Ultra

Fallout 3 then. Initially NVIDIA would have had a pretty good advantage here, but the new Catalyst 8.12 drivers boosted overall X2 performance pretty significantly. As a result the performance is roughly equal. Which was horribly bizarre to observe really, every framerate was the same, like a weird freak accident.

but in case you didn't notice...  yes up to 1920x1200 you can spot CPU limitation. And we're merely using a Core i7 965 processor at 3.7 GHz. We can solve that, lets try 8x AA with this title to see what happens.

Now here we have the same Ultra image quality settings again, this time with 8x AA enabled. And yes... we finally have a situation where the X2 shines.

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\.