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Graphics and Performance
As you are no doubt aware by now, F.E.A.R. uses one of the best game engines currently available, and uses some of the newest features such as soft shadowing. The engine is utilised to devastating effect, with particle and smoke effects looking just astounding. However, this tends to be equally devastating to all but the most recent hardware, so here at Guru3d we thought we would do a performance analysis on some of todays GPUs. With this in mind I sent the Don aka Hilbert off into a dark room for a few days with nothing but his collection of graphics cards and a test system. Serves him right for having more graphics cards than me heh! Thankfully he survived the ordeal and came back to me with this rather
interesting set of results:
All tests were run at maximum in game settings with Soft Shadows enabled on all of the cards, using the latest available official drivers. We used the benchmark provided with the retail version of the game, rather than that provided by the multiplayer BETA used in last months preview so results arent directly comparable. Unfortunately we had a problem with the results the benchmark returned regarding AA and AF, and in the end decided it was better to omit the results all together to avoid confusion. Keep an eye out for updated results, and also expect the F.E.A.R. benchmarks to be added to future graphics card reviews so that you can see how new hardware manages the F.E.A.R. challenge. It is also important to note that AA cannot be used in the game alongside soft shadows, so take your pick!
The first thing to note is that not one of the mid-range (and yes, unfortunately we now have to relegate the once great 6800GT and Ultra to the mid-ish-range) cards could return a playable frame rate at anything above 1024x768. Shocking isnt it? But yes, this engine requires that much grunt to run at its full! Not until you get to the 6800 Ultra SLI results can you play at 1280x1024 at decent FPS hitting a respectable 53FPS average. In fact the SLI set up managed to pull 35FPS at 1600x1200 this really shows the benefit of SLI for those lucky few! At the other end of the scale, the lowly 6600 looks just totally inadequate for this game, where the 6600GS, X800GTO and GT barely scrape through. The single 6800Ultra seems to be a slightly ahead of the single card competition throughout all the results, with the X800XL and 6800GT marginally behind it. The single greatest thing affecting the performance in this game is soft shadowing. While it is nice for new games to support this feature, many people are going to have to turn it off. This certainly perks up frame rates, and you should have no problem running the game at 1280x1024 on something like a 6800GT/X800XL providing you are willing to sacrifice them.
Turning off Soft Shadows also returned a playable frame rate on the 6800 Ultra SLI rig at 1600x1200. Seeing as this was my test rig, I can say the game comfortably performed throughout at 1600x1200 2xAF 0xAA Soft Shadows disabled. FPS was around 40-50 for the most part, and I even attempted running with 2xAA enabled although this created more variable results meaning some drops below 30fps so I decided to disable it again, although it would probably have been manageable for 90% of the game.
