I have Thief 3 (Thief, deadly shadows), and the bad news is, the frame rates are just as low as they were in Deus Ex 2.

Lots of people complained that Deus Ex 2 seemed to be totally unoptimized for the PC. Now that they've put out a 2nd game with the same engine, with equally low frame rates, it seems that it's just a really horrible game engine.

For some additional info on the game, I'll cut and paste another message I wrote on another forum:

"... in Deus ex 2, I used to turn off the shadows entirely, which helped. But you can't do that here in Thief 3, so the frame rate will be worse than deus ex 2.

Some advice:

#1: Very Important - turn off vsync! At least on my graphics card, a geforce fx 5900, due I believe to shoddy programming in the game, having vsync on means your frame rate will be fixed to some fraction of your refresh rate. That is, if your refresh rate is 85hz, your frame rate will be either 85, 42, 28, 21, etc. Meaning if it should have been 60, you will get only 42. If it should have been 41, you will get only 28. etc. Unless you want to take a massive hit to your frame rate, turn vsync off!

#2. Turning on 3rd person mode cuts your frame rate by 10% to 30%. This is rather a huge amount, so I recommend not using it unless necessary to see around corners or whatever.


I am forced to play this game at 1024x768, which is ridiculous considering that I can play Far Cry at 1280x960. And now I can see why the game reviewers criticized the graphics. They don't look too good, especially because of the pseudo-1st person mode.

You are never actually in 1st person, switching to 1st person merely moves your 3rd person view into the front of the head of your 3rd person character, but he is still there moving around, which makes all of your movement jerky and clumsy.

There are various graphics options which theoretically could improve the look of the game or improve the frame rate by turning them off, but they seem to have only a small effect on the frame rate, so you might as well leave them turned on and have the game look as good as it can.

This really must be the crappiest game engine ever, it's amazing how it manages to produce such low frame rates while still not looking all that good. And 2 major games, Deus Ex 2 and now Thief 3, have been produced under this horrible thing. Let us pray they don't make any more games using it.


Now, I don't want to totally dissuade people from buying the game. If you have powerful hardware, you can set the resolution to 1024x768 and still get ok frame rates. The game won't look that good, but so it goes. And I have a feeling it's gonna be a very fun game to play, from the little bit I've played so far.

By the way, I have an amd 2800 cpu, geforce fx5900, 512 megs pc 3200 ram, windows xp. At 1024x768, I am getting frame rates of 30-45, generally, in first person mode. Much worse in 3rd person, and much much worse when I tried it briefly at 1280x1024. There is no option to run it at 1280x960, although no one will likely be able to run it above 1024x768 anyway."