Let’s go back some months and see what Lionhead was statingĪbout the PC version of Fable III: “When the difficulty came up we were talking about what would PC players want. Or perhaps the game studio thinks that key mapping, graphical options, menus that can be browsed with the mouse, an added difficulty level and keyboard on-screen indications are what distinguish a PC from a console game. Lionhead could easily avoid stating that this could be a PC game. From what we’ve seen, Fable III seems like most console ports with some little extra touches here and there. The mouse acceleration hints to the acceleration that can be found on gamepad sticks, the game’s performance is not good as the engine was not polished and was not optimized for quadcores. Fable III features some nice PC graphical touches – like the higher quality shadows – but at its heart is what most of us already knew before trying it a console game.Īll in all, Lionhead has failed to deliver a truly PC version of Fable III. And as you’d expect from a console game, the interactivity with the environment is pretty minimal. Textures are of higher quality than those used in the X360 version but there are a lot of places where the environments feel bland due to the lack of shadows and improper use of SSAO. Fable III has detailed characters, if only a bit cartoon-ish and supports most modern-day effects like soft particles, bloom, motion blur, sun shafts, normal mapping and SSAO. Graphics wise, the game looks good but nowhere as good as The Witcher 2. Still, the game felt sluggish at 50fps even with Vsync and there is noticeable mouse acceleration. Those of you who want proper Vsync functionality should force it via Nvidia’s Control Panel. However, when you do enable it, the game locks to 30fps instead of your monitor’s refresh rate. Fable III, even at 50fps, feels sloppy and unlike many games, there is major tearing when Vsync is disabled. Our guess is that Lionhead simply ‘borrowed’ those animations and didn’t polish them. We should note that the game was targeted for a 30fps experience in X360. This results to awkward behaviour when the game runs at a higher framerate. To make things worse, all animations seem to be created at 30fps. By doing that, you will eventually reduce the CPU burden. By lowering the view distance, we managed to get 60fps with Vsync enabled – not constant – so those of you that are stuck with dualcores should lower it. We’ve also tried to mess with options to find out which option has the highest impact on the CPU. There are a lot of graphical options to mess around, so we are pretty sure that those of you with low or middle-end cards will definitely find a good mix. Most of the time, our GPU was averaging around 60-75%. Those who want to disable this demanding AA technique should find its. There were few occasions where our GTX295 was used at its fullest, due to the fact that the game uses SSAA on its very high settings. We’ve seen a lot of console ports that can’t take advantage of quadcores and Fable III is one of them. Moreover, the fact that the game is optimized for dualcores, shows that Lionhead didn’t really try to optimize their engine for the PC. In that particular scene, we were running with only 30fps, even when there wasn’t anything on-screen to justify such a low framerate. Take, for example, the following screenshot. We wouldn’t mind such low performance, if only the game was actually graphically better than CD Projekt’s title. Performance is not good and the game ran worse than The Witcher 2. When we tried to simulate a dualcore system, we didn’t notice any performance hit at all. Fable III is CPU bound and to be more precise, it’s optimized for dualcore CPUs. We’re pleased to inform you that you won’t need to mess around with the game’s profile this time, as Nvidia has already included an SLI profile for it. Like always, we used an overclocked Q9650 (4.2Ghz) with 4GB DDR2, a GTX295, Windows 7 64Bit and Nvidia’s latest ForceWare drivers. Lionhead stated that Fable III PC would be a truly PC game, so it’s time to see how the game performs with a modern-day PC and whether the company has kept its promise or not. Back in May, Microsoft released the PC version of Lionhead’s RPG game, Fable III.
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