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 on 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 represents the average fps you'll get when playing the game.

The difference we see in the chart is not obvious when playing the game. Both cards performed well at low resolutions when rendering the game, but they lack the power to present us with a satisfactory framerate.

Likewise, when enabling MultiSampling and Anisotropic Filtering, the MSI NX 6800 produces more frames than its relative from Gainward when running at 640x480. However, increasing the resolution further, that advantage is immediately lost and it falls behind the GT which finally shows its teeth.