Introduction

After examining Fallout 3’s performance with the latest high-end graphics cards last week, we’re here today to see how the game performs with a myriad of mainstream cards ranging in price from $70 to nearly $200.

Since it’s largely based on the same Gamebryo game engine used in Oblivion, Fallout 3 performs quite well with the mainstream cards represented here in this article. We did turn down the graphics settings one notch, from "very high" to "high", but otherwise no real compromises were made; we even included 8xAA benchmark results.

Fortunately going from very high to high doesn’t compromise image quality badly, we’ve taken a batch of screenshots to highlight the differences:

High settings

Ultra settings

High settings

Ultra settings

High graphics settings

Ultra graphics settings

High settings

Ultra settings

Visually the biggest difference between high and ultra high quality lie in shadow quality and water reflections, as well as draw distances for items like actor/item/object fade (toggles when NPCs and other objects are first visible), grass/light fade, and level of detail (LOD). Honestly the shadowing in Fallout 3 isn’t nearly as extensive as what Bethesda provided in Oblivion, and the water reflections only apply in limited situations. Even the LOD and view distances between the two settings are hard to illustrate properly in screenshots.

Because of these limitations, you really don’t sacrifice much when going from ultra to high quality.