12 - Thief 3

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

The X300 and X600XT are nothing but a bad joke when comparing them with the 6800GT powered Gainward card. The framerate is very stable and above 40 at all times, up to a resolution of 1280x1024.

Enabling 4x multisampling is for once, worth the drop. The best combination of quality and performance seem to be the 43 fps under 1024x768.