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F.E.A.R. GPU Performance Tests: Setting a New Standard

 by Josh Venning on October 20, 2005 9:00 AM EST
117 Comments | Add A Comment
117 Comments
Soft Shadows Performance

Please refer back to our earlier section on soft shadows to learn why (aside from abysmal performance) we recommend against enabling soft shadows. Upon selecting the option in FEAR to enable soft shadows, a dialog box will pop up to inform the gamer that soft shadows are a high end option, which will only run well on heavy hitting graphics hardware. It is very true that you need to high end hardware to run the game with soft shadows, but we just don't like the feature.

With Soft Shadows enabled, the game takes a very significant performance hit. You can see that the 7800 GTX and GT become borderline-unplayable at 1600x1200, while the rest of the cards' framerates drop off quite abruptly. The X800 GT is only really playable at the absolute lowest resolution, and the X1300 PRO isn't really playable at all. At 37 fps, the 6600 GT does very well at 800x600, and although this is a low resolution by other games' standards, FEAR is still impressive. While 640x480 leaves something to be desired, 800x600 doesn't do a bad job in a pinch. But in a case like the 6600 GT, it is especially desirable to disable soft shadows and go with a higher resolution.

4xAA/8xAF Performance Tests Final Words
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  • xsilver - Thursday, October 20, 2005 - link

    6800gt's are high mid range cards, whereas the ultras are not good value pricewise... plus not many people have them

    the card that is missing is the 16 pipe last gen ATI cards, x800 pro/xt etc...
    could that card be added please?

    also, people might want a point of reference for old systems that want to see their card splutter on this game (9800pro / 5900fx) -- it would be great to see if these cards are still playable since they are using ps2.0 and generally older tech

  • ZobarStyl - Thursday, October 20, 2005 - link

    Because more people have GT's than Ultras and it's not too terribly hard to extrapolate out the change between the two.

  • Bingo13 - Thursday, October 20, 2005 - link

    Very good article, would 2gb of ram help in this game as it does in BF2?

  • DerekWilson - Thursday, October 20, 2005 - link

    this game is very GPU limited, as you can tell by how steeply the resolution scaling graphs drop off. The game won't run at over 1600x1200 without a little hacking.

    We will look into testing with more RAM, but our initial thought is that performance (especially at higher resolutions or with AA enabled) will not be incredibly affected by RAM. We will update the article if we find anything.

  • Z3dd - Friday, October 21, 2005 - link

    What about http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/video/giga-1.h...">this issue?
    Scoll down to the analasysis of local videomemory usage in F.E.A.R.

    Though their conclusion is that F.E.A.R is so taxing on the GPU that you won't
    notice that your card runs out of local memory.

  • Thatguy97 - Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - link

    lol i can 80 fps at 10 by 7 on integrated now

  • Thatguy97 - Wednesday, June 24, 2015 - link

    this game shit all over my x800 xl :((((((
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