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F.E.A.R

As many of you will be aware, F.E.A.R (or First Encounter Assault & Recon for short) involves a rather mysterious looking girl in a red dress, a man with an unappetizing taste for human flesh and some rather flashy action set pieces al la' The Matrix. All of this is brought together by one of the best game engines around.

There has been a great amount of talk surrounding this game as of late and we here at Guru3D aim to please.

F.E.A.R makes its cinematic pretensions clear from the start. As soon as the credits roll, and the music starts, you are treated to the full works. The camera pans across scores of troops locked 'n' loaded and ready to hunt you down, all seemingly linked to 'Paxton Fettel', a strange kind of guy with extraordinary psychic power capable of controlling battalions of soldiers and a habit of feeding off any poor unfortunate innocents - presumably to aid his powers of concentration. It doesnt end there, after a short briefing at F.E.A.R. HQ you are sent off to hunt down Fettel equipped with reflex's that are 'off the chart'. These reflexes are put to excellent use, with a slow motion effects like that of Max Payne, or the afore mentioned Matrix. But here, it is oooohhhh so much more satisfying thanks to the outstanding environmental effects. Sparks fly everywhere, as chunks of masonry are blasted from the walls and blood splatters from your latest victim. The physics are just great, with box's sent flying, shelves tipped over, and objects hurtling towards your head. And the explosions, well, the explosions just have to be seen, and what's so great about this is you can witness it in all its glory in slow motion.

Let me confirm to you that based on this F.E.A.R. will have you shaking on the edge of your seat, if not falling off it. The tension is brought to just the right level with key moments that will make your heart leap. Play the demo and you will see what I mean. The key to this is the girl. Without revealing anything significant, lets just say that she could take on the whole of Mars for creepiness.

Time for some modern game testing. F.E.A.R has a built in performance test which we used to measure performance. F.E.A.R is an extremely hard title for the graphics cards when you set it to maximum image quality. Again we see the Intel system leap forwards.

Above we enabled 4xAA and 16xAF, the results shown are based on maximum in-game quality settings however softshadows are disabled.

We tested the maximum detail settings to stress the cards to see if the CPU still has an effect. It hardly does as we can clearly see that modern titles are less CPU bound and more graphics card bound.

With a 8800 GTX in SLI we'd probably see way more variation in the results as this is the issue with graphics cards craving more power from the CPU.

Serious Sam 2

March 2001, developer Croteam released the original Serious Sam for the PC and pretty much made other standard first person shooters look like they were in neutral. The game, along with its stand alone follow up The Second Encounter, had an impressive graphics engine, huge outdoor environments, some wacky weapons, a fun co-op mode, and most importantly some of the numerous and strangest enemies in FPS history. When players first saw the headless bomb filled suicide attacker charging at them full blast with a blood curdling scream, they knew that this game was something special.
 

Four and a half years later, Croteam's turn return to the plate with Serious Sam 2 and while it's basic gameplay hasn't changed it has enough new features to make it a fun and solid follow up to the original. The graphics are also greatly improved. Like the first, there is a story in Serious Sam 2 (there are even some extended cut scenes that pull the story forward) but you can pretty much ignore this aspect. It's all about "Serious" Sam Stone going from point A to point B and blowing up everything that gets in his way.

Constantly flaunting a huge draw distance, extensive foliage, many impressive lighting effects such as refraction and even HDR, plus more than solid framerates, the Serious Engine 2 looks like a real beast.

A modern title yet CPU bound, it always has been the case for the Serious Sam series. In the above chart you can see the results with HDR enabled and 16 levels of anisotropic filtering enabled. This actually is my preferred personal IQ setting for pretty much all games. Again we see similar results. The difference at 10x7 is huge ! But the minute we go higher in resolution the graphics bottleneck kicks back in.

Mind you that the 7950 GX2 graphics card is still to be considered a pretty high-end 400 USD piece of hardware.

Let's take a look at another even newer game. A bitch for any system... GRAW !

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter

In Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 3, players will embody Captain Scott Mitchell as he commands the Ghosts and Special Forces allies equipped with the IWS in the quest to save the president of the United States, recover stolen nuclear codes and eliminate a vicious band of renegade soldiers hell-bent on unleashing catastrophe. The game unfolds entirely in Mexico City, where numerous, thoroughly researched and detailed environments will deliver complete immersion into the future of urban warfare.

Don't mistake the PC version for being a port of the Xbox 360 game. The PC version has larger and different levels than those featured on the Xbox 360, as well as a different graphics engine and style of gameplay. The game itself looks great, and the intricate physics modeling seen in the single-player version is still active in the multiplayer version. In fact, it's so detailed that if you have the upcoming Aegia physics card, you'll see sparks bouncing off objects in the environment. Even if you don't have a physics card, though, there are all sorts of other interactions you'll encounter in multiplayer. For instance, aluminum cans litter the street, and stepping on them not only kicks them around, but also creates a loud sound, which may betray your presence to the enemy.

You need to have a graphics monster as a graphics card for this game as it can be hard on current graphics cards, even high-end ones. We are playing the level Coup d' Etat (Checkpoint 2) here (fantastic level). Configuration wise we enable as always all eye-candy.  We have 16xAF enabled, and furthermore all settings set to high.

We have every possible bell & whistle enabled but it is quite shocking to see a game taking such a hefty toll on this not exactly cheap gaming rig. Again a mediocre difference can be spotted but mainly at the lower resolutions.

Right, it's to head onwards to the conclusion.