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 this specific game and with AA and AFx0, the 6800 Ultra did quite well. The reported average fps is considered enough for smooth in-game movement without any noticeable"onscreen breaks". The X800XT did far better in this test with a total of 56fps at the highest possible resolution tested.

From what we can see in the above graph, the 6800 Ultra does not have sufficient power to run smoothly at the higher resolutions with AA and AF at 4x and 8X respectively.