Asus Extreme N6800GT - 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 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.

Just as in the the case of the X850XT, the N6800GT is also CPU-bound with the first three resolutions as Thief 3 DS is an incredibly demanding game for both the GPU and CPU. The N6800GT starts off pretty well with 45 frames per second but when increasing the resolution to 1600x1200, the framerate becomes unacceptable.

When enabling Multisampling through the game menu and Anisotropic Filtering through the drivers menu, the framerates are almost halved. If you really feel like increasing the image quality of the game, it seems 800x600 is the only resolution that the card can handle satisfactorily.