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.

Thief 3 is a torture test for graphics cards. All lower class cards fail to provide stable performance in this benchmark when selecting full details from the settings menu.

With AA and AF settings disabled, the AOpen performed well in this test. Although it was second to the ASUS N7800 by few fps difference, in comparison to the other two cards, the AOpen 7800 is the card that manages to beat the 60fps limit of the Thief 3 graphics engine in single mode.

Once more the differences from the previous generation cards is clearly visible with AA and AF enabled. And once more the Aopen card came second to the ASUS. Seems like the higher setting of clock and memory frequencies on the ASUS N7800 gives it the edge.