Connect 3D X800XT - 13 - Thief 3

Instead of Deus Ex from now on we’ll be testing our cards using Thief 3. It’s based on the same engine but it’s much less GPU intensive and playable by more VGA cards than Deus.

The game makes severe use of Pixel Shader 1.1 instructions, the bloom effect and stencil shadows to achieve a wonderful result in your screen.

In the game you play the part of Master Thief Garrett who is back to rule out any evil forces using his unique stealth abilities. Deadly Shadows shows what stealth gameplay is all about. This game really gives you the feel of sneaking around and holding your breath when stuck in a sticky situation.

Since there is no official benchmark for the game, we’ll do our tests using a GPU intensive scene from the tutorial-level which we believe that represents the average fps you’ll get when playing the game.

All cards seem to face difficulties running this game. The framerates are really low and hardly acceptable at 1600x1200, even with performance beasts such as our X800XT and 6800Ultra.

Enabling 4x Multisampling and 8x Anisotropic filtering makes the game unplayable at high resolutions. The best compromise between quality and performance is running the game at 1024x768 (provided that your monitor is 17" or less).