A dozen hours of Black Ops 3 testing completed and we're moving to the next sequentially-incremented video game: Fallout 4. It's got a bigger number at the end.

Bethesda has one of the longest development life cycles in the industry, but the company's games are also among – arguably – the longest lasting, thanks to the undying efforts of modders. It helps that the modding community is able to fill gaps in Bethesda's code or build entirely new games from the strong foundation set forth by the veteran RPG team.

Our Fallout 4 game review & gameplay analysis is live on the homepage already, if that's what you're looking for. This post looks exclusively and in depth at Fallout 4's graphics settings and performance on PC. The below Fallout 4 PC benchmark tests FPS performance across nVidia and AMD GPUs, including the GTX 750 Ti, 960, 970, 270X, 285, 390X, and many more. VRAM and memory consumption is also looked at loosely below, hopefully establishing a baseline for the best video cards for Fallout 4 on PC.

Because mod tools don't yet exist – and certainly no mods did during our pre-release testing – we are not accounting for the inevitable performance hit created by future graphics mods.

Update: Volumetric lighting benchmark now live.

Living up to the rolling hype-ball generated by Fallout 4 seems nearly impossible. After reminiscing about Fallout 3 for years, living through false rumors, and the non-stop recent postings pertaining to Bethesda’s latest game, expectations are at an all-time high.

Fallout 4 is the much-anticipated continuation of the Fallout series. The first-person shooter, role-playing game is based in a futuristic world similar to our own, but diverging on a timeline wrought with nuclear war.

The newest game in the series is set in Commonwealth of Massachusetts -- Boston, specifically. Fallout 4 has been in development since the release of Fallout 3, a late 2008 launch, and uses the same engine as Skyrim. The basic storyline (note: this only covers the very beginning and initial storyline setup, nothing more) behind Fallout 4 is that a family is cryogenically frozen in Vault 111, after getting in just as the nuclear bombs go off. We’re then awoken, and see our child being taken by two unknown NPCs who’ve just killed our significant other. After waking up again, we discover that we’re the only one left alive in Vault 111. So begins the game, setting forth on a journey to find a child.

Now that the background is established, let’s cover some of the features Bethesda did well on: settlement building, FPS mechanics, weapon and armor modding, and game atmosphere. We’ll later visit subpar performance for average graphics and irritating bugs.

The video game industry's news output is churning in full capacity as November nears. Our contacts and colleagues in the industry are almost ubiquitously undergoing crunch right now, working longer hours to finalize that last bit of content before “going Gold.” That means a lot of news, so we've decided to start rounding-up weekly game news at the end of the week.

This week, the items to watch have been No Man's Sky for its “I've Seen Things” trailer (and release date), Star Citizen for an updated flight model, GOG's introduction of ancient RPGs to its service, Overwatch beta, and Fallout 4's mod support.

Full news coverage in the video, though I've also posted the script below:

Sword Coast Legends is a newly-released D&D cRPG that has entrenched itself deeply within Wizards of the Coast territory, all the way down to adoption of the 5th edition core ruleset. For those of us who haven't yet dug our way out of the insurmountable pile of 3.5 books, the ruleset may be unfamiliar, but it's still D&D.

We've previously covered Sword Coast Legends, with our first round of coverage from GDC – near the game's unveil – and the most recent at PAX Prime. Until recently, our only hands-on sessions with the game were as players, with one limited on-the-fly DM session. This DM session dropped me in to a premade dungeon crawl with my staff (“with,” not “against,” because we're playing co-operatively to enable a good experience); my role here was limited to staying one step ahead of the players, trying to plant mobs and traps according to current challenge. I did not get to look at the actual DM toolkit – the utilities used for making longer campaigns and custom modules – until the last two weeks.

This time, I spent about eight hours building a fully fleshed-out module, complete with back-story, multiple levels, and custom quests. The objective was to give my old D&D group a run that'd remind us of the tabletop days.

Epistory - Typing Chronicles is an “atmospheric action/adventure game” from developer Fishing Cactus, available on Steam Early Access since September 30th. The game mechanics focus on two of my favorite things: typing long words as fast as possible and riding a giant fox. What more do you really need?

The basic premise of Epistory is that you’re a girl who’s lost her memory, and—again—you’re riding a giant fox. The forest is in danger, and it's the player's job to clean house by ridding of various patches of bramble and giant snakes. That was about as far as the narrative got in the time that I played, and there was no indication that it would get more elaborate than that, but possibilities abound in a title so early in development. Additional “chapters” of the game will be released over the course of its time in early access, leaving plenty of room for expansion through its 1Q16 release target.

Looks like Peter Piper decided to take a few days off, and all hell broke loose. Good job, Peter. Now five unfortunate souls have been thrust into the midst of one of the most brutal vermin infestations in Warhammer history!

That’s the premise of Vermintide: The End Times, developed by Fat Shark Games, and I couldn’t be happier.

It’s important to note that I am a little biased (a necessity of good game reviews), as I am a huge Warhammer and Warhammer 40k fan, but Vermintide is everything I could have asked for in a co-op survival thriller. From the very instant the game is loaded, I was filled with a sense of dread – every piece fits together to give the player a desperate, horror-filled experience without relying on cliché jump scares or a false sense of foreboding.

Fallout 4 is one of Bethesda’s most anticipated forthcoming games. We previously covered the Fallout 4 trailer and the follow-up E3 presentation; since then, though, there has been little substantial news. Bethesda did tweet that Fallout 4 has over 111k lines of dialogue, which is more than Fallout 3 and Skyrim combined, but that’s about the most that’s come out.

Just yesterday, Bethesda offered another peek at Fallout by way of Fallout 4’s recommended and minimum system requirements.

Divinity: Original Sin 2’s Kickstarter campaign has just wrapped up, and Larian Studios pulled in just over $2 million. For those not familiar with the first game, Divinity: Original Sin was a turn-based RPG that was met with critical acclaim. It pulled in nearly every award it could when it was released two years ago, recognized primarily for its traditional RPG throwbacks and character progression.

Undertale by Toby Fox is a genuinely creative and enjoyable RPG. Unreal Engine, CryEngine, Unity, RPGMaker (and, in this case, GameMaker) have made it much easier for indie developers to create games, but at the same time, much harder for them to stand out from the crowd. Undertale has no problems with that, however.

The basic backstory is explained thoroughly in the intro and on the website, but here's a quick recap: Undertale takes place in a world of two races – humans and "monsters" (a lot of them are pretty cute). At some point, the two fought a war that was easily won by the humans -- but now the year is 201X, and monsters have been sealed deep under Mount Ebott for ages. For some reason, you decide to climb the mountain and fall into the mouth of a deep cavern (to start your tale. Under it).

Today starts off with some exciting news -- especially for some old-school PC gamers: The next installment in the long-running Might & Magic franchise will be entering its second closed beta today. Titled Might & Magic: Heroes VII, the beta is open to all those who have already pre-ordered the game.