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.

Unfortunately none of the mid-range vga cards are able to produce enough frames per second under any satisfactory resolution. Both seem to have the same lack of power and 800x600 is the maximum enjoyable setting.

Of course the 4x Multisampling and 8x Anisotropic Filtering we applied on the game brings horrific results. This time the framerates are given for reference use only.