Fallout 3 is based on the same engine used by The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and it is a DirectX 9.0c (Shader 3.0) game. To measure performance, we used the FRAPS utility running an outdoor scene at God mode, running through enemy fire, triggering post processing effects, and ending with a big explosion in front of Dupont Circle. First we tried to run this program at 1440x900 with all image quality settings at “low” with the motherboard on-board video enabled. Only AMD785G could run this program; Intel G45 could not run Fallout 3. Then we installed a GeForce 9600 GT and ran this program with image quality set to “high.” The results for this scenario are presented below.

On Fallout 3 with a GeForce 9600 GT installed all three CPUs from AMD achieved similar performance. Athlon II X2 240e was 16.34% faster than Celeron E3200 and Athlon II X3 435 was 8.70% faster than Pentium E5200.