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.

At low screen resolutions, the fps we got were more or less expected. On the other hand, looking at the fps for 1600x1200 screen resolution, the DUAL GPU card was the best performing card. The Thief3 gaming engine prefers two GPUs on the same PCB rather than two cards in SLI mode. This also happened in some 3dMark games.

Again, at low resolution, everything seems to be normal, with the N7800GT Dual being slightly slower than the two 7800GTX SLI and faster than the single GPU cards. However, at high resolution, the Thief3 engine shows its preference.