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Fallout 3 Gameplay Performance and Image Quality

One of the most anticipated PC titles in history has finally landed, amid cries of rage and splendor alike. We're here to examine real-world gameplay experiences in Fallout 3 on six of today’s hottest video cards, always with an eye for value.

Introduction

More than four years ago, Bethesda Softworks announced that it had licensed the Fallout IP from its previous owner, Interplay, and that it would develop and publish the third installment in the Fallout franchise. About 3 years later, Bethesda followed up that announcement, stating that it had purchased the Fallout IP from Interplay outright for $5.75 million.

Thus, Bethesda acquired the unenviable task of creating a sequel to a 10-year old classic RPG with some of the thickest nostalgia-goggles imaginable. Finally launched on October 28, 2008, Fallout 3 was met with mostly critical acclaim, appreciation from new fans of the series, and of course copious condemnation from die-hard Fallout fanatics. Fallout 3 is quite a departure from the style of Fallout and Fallout 2, but it does largely remain faithful to the spirit of the original games, if not the letter.

The Game

Fallout 3 takes place approximately 200 years after a nuclear war in 2077 which destroyed most of the US. Luckily, you live underground, safe within the confines of Vault 101. The game begins with your birth, where you select your name and decide what you will look like when you grow up. Then, you control your tiny avatar as a baby, learning to walk, which introduces you to Fallout 3's vital statistics system: S.P.E.C.I.A.L. You are then transported a number of times along the course of your character's development, eventually finding that your father has fled the vault and that vault security forces are looking for you, likely with some malice in mind. Your only option is to escape.

After escaping the former safety of Vault 101, you are greeted with what is the core of Fallout 3. It is a large open world action RPG, with quite a few points of interest, story lines, and a multitude of characters complete with voice-over acting. From that inauspicious beginning, you can become whoever you want: A savior or a villain. In fact, early on you are met with the choice of disarming an unexploded nuclear bomb around which a settlement has prospered, or rigging the same to explode (see above) at the behest of a wealthy entrepreneur with designs on the town's real estate, incinerating everyone living around it.

The Game Engine

Fallout 3 is based upon an updated Gamebryo engine, which also powered one of Bethesda's earlier games, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It also uses the SpeedTree system and the Havok Physics engine, both also used in Oblivion. In fact, Fallout 3 has received a quantity of criticism for its numerous similarities to Oblivion. Most of Oblivion's technologies made it into Fallout 3, and even a fair few of its gameplay features.

At any rate, the Gamebryo engine has been updated for Fallout 3, with the welcome addition of native support for HDR and AA, in-engine transparent texture multisampling, and vastly improved water rendering techniques compared to what Oblivion had to offer. Nonetheless, the base engine is now fairly old, so we expect to see a high level of performance. This game runs in the DX9 API, as far as we can see there is no DX10 API support at all. Also considering that the PC version of Fallout 3 was developed along-side the XBOX 360 version, and runs in DX9 we do expect overall performance to be good on modern PC hardware.

It is worth noting here that Fallout 3 is a "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" title. Though that fact, in and of itself, does not necessarily mean that the game will perform better on NVIDIA silicon, that has been in the case with past "TWIMTBP" games. We will certainly be playing close attention to that.

The Video Cards

And so, for this gameplay evaluation, we have chosen a wide array of video cards with which to examine Fallout 3's performance.

From NVIDIA, we have a GeForce GTX 280 with 1GB of GDDR3, an original GeForce GTX 260 with 192 shader cores and 896MB of GDDR3, and an updated GeForce GTX 260 with 216 shader cores and also with 896MB of GDDR3.

From AMD, we have the dual-GPU ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 with 1GB of GDDR5 memory per GPU, a Radeon HD 4870 with 1GB of GDDR5, and a Radeon HD 4870 with 512MB of GDDR5.

These six products comprise the performance mainstream and enthusiast classes of video cards from both AMD and NVIDIA and their respective partners.