Connect 3D X850XT PE - 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.

Thief 3 is an excellent challenge for the X850 XT. All lower class cards failed to provide stable perfomance with this benchmark when selecting full details from the settings menu. The Connect3D card still had trouble producing enough frames per second but at least it came up with 40fps at 1280x1024 which is the most appropriate resolution with this card in order to enjoy the game.

Enabling 4x Multisampling and 8x Anisotropic filtering makes the game unplayable at high resolutions with the majority of the cards. This is also the case with the X850XT PE from Connect3d. The best resolution seems to be 1024x768.