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.

The X300 had a hard time rendering this really graphically heavy game. At 640x480 the game is barely playable.

Since Thief 3 is based on Deus Ex's engine, there is no support for Anti-Aliasing but instead it uses Multisampling technology which is something similar. That way, we set Multisampling to 4x and Anisotropic filtering to 8x through ATI's control panel. The resulting scores are a disaster. We could almost count the frames without the use of a program!