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 a torture test for any graphics card. Even at low resolutions and with no multisampling enabled, the results are far from great, when in other latest games we have figures of 100+ FPS.

The X850XT delivers the best framerate especially as the resolution rises, but even without any of the advanced game features enabled, we can see that at higher resolutions, the framerate drops considerably.

Only the two high end graphics cards can offer a satisfactory playing environment with AA and AF enabled. All other card owners are advised not to enable any of the advanced features to avoid a jerky game.