Game Benchmarks: Fallout 3
Fallout 3 is a great game built on the demanding graphics engine evolved from the legendary Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. Let’s see how these cards perform at maximum graphics settings, with no AA or AF:
Fallout 3 seems to prefer the Gigabyte GV-N250ZL-1GI, but we can’t be sure it likes the GeForce architecture or the full gigabyte of video RAM more. It’s a solid lead, but with the minimum frame rates so close between the contenders, it’s not a monster win.
We also suspect a little funny business with this benchmark as the Asus card seemed to max out at exactly 63 FPS in these benchmarks regardless of the resolution or image-quality settings. While vsync was forced off in Catalyst Control Center as well as the game itself, a constant maximum frame rate like that is suspicious. If it were caused by a CPU limitation, it should have also shown itself in the GeForce benchmarks as well.
Let’s add 4xAA and 15xAF to the mix and see if the story changes any:
The results appear quite close to the benchmarks with no AA and AF, but the GV-N250ZL-1GI has increased its lead a little over the Asus 4850 Matrix.
Gotta love this, Toms do the usual HW review of cards and right at the top before you can even see the article is a google advert for hardwarecanuks.com advertising their own reviews.
Fail.
The vast majority of reference 9800GTX+ and GTS250 boards will overclock to the Gigabyte speeds. In fact my ref EVGA 9800GTX+ overclocks higher on both the GPU and MEM.
IMHO the fancy capacitors and Zalman cooler simply arn't worth the exta cost.
nice