PowerColor Radeon X1950 Pro SCS3

F.E.A.R.

Publisher: VU Games

We used the full retail version of F.E.A.R. patched to version 1.08. The game makes use of a lot of effects - including soft shadows, volumetric lighting, parallax mapping and particle effects, along with a slow-motion mode that really taxes today's top of the line GPU's. There's extensive use of high resolution textures. The walls are both bump mapped and parallax mapped to give a realistic feel to the brick walls that are a big feature of this title. Also, the world is incredibly destructible, which is made more realistic by parallax mapping.

In general, this is a graphically intense game and the most outstanding part of the graphics engine is undoubtedly the player character's shadow that is cast on the wall. It also has the most advanced A.I. that we have ever seen in a game engine to date -- there are times when you'll find yourself with your pants down around your ankles with nowhere to go.

We used the built in benchmark for our testing. Although this isn't as stressful as many portions of the game, it does give a good indication of overall game performance.







In F.E.A.R., PowerColor's Radeon X1950 Pro SCS3 will give you a decent gaming experience at 1280x1024 4xAA and at 1600x1200 2xAA with the maximum in-game details set. If you want to stretch this card to 1920x1200, you'll get reasonable performance with 0xAA enabled. However, if you weep at the sight of jagged edges, you're going to have to lower the quality settings a little bit.

The card manages to see off competition from Nvidia's GeForce 7900 GT and 7900 GS cards, but Inno3D's heavily overclocked 7900 GS iChiLL Edition manages to spoil the party, albeit by the slimmest of margins -- at most, you're going to see a four frames per second difference at over 50 frames per second. Both are very playable at that frame rate though, so you're not really going to get any kind of image quality benefit as a result of the small frame rate advantage.