12 - 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 with 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 on 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 has you holding your breath when trapped 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 represents the average fps you’ll get when playing the game.

The differences between the two X600 cards lessen as we move on to more demanding games such as Thief 3. Stencil shadows and pixel shading seem to bring the worst out of the AX600 and gameplay turns out to be annoying, even at 800x600.

Enabling 4x multisapling is disappointing, as no card was able to run the game at more that 20 fps.