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 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 perform 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.

If you're looking for a card to render Thief 3 with all details to the maximum level, then this card is definitely not for you. Not unless you are willing to sacrifice resolution.

Since Thief 3 is based on Deus Ex's engine, there is no support for Anti-Aliasing, but instead uses Multisampling technology which is something similar. Be it so, we set Multisampling to 4x and Anisotropic filtering to 8x through ATI's control panel.

Just like the X300, the drop is obviously large and unacceptable for playing.