Radeon X1900-series roundup

F.E.A.R.

Publisher: VU Games

We used the full retail version of F.E.A.R. patched to version 1.02. 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 no where to go. For anyone who hasn't bought this game yet, we highly recommend you do - check out our full review here.

We did a manual run-through from the "Heavy Resistance" level, between two save game checkpoints - it was a section of intense outdoor gameplay that lasted around three and a half minutes. We recorded frame over time graphs for all of our manual run-throughs because we found that the SloMo mode dropped our frame rates in to the low teens. We suspect this drop is part of Monolith's technique for slowing down the gameplay, as the game was not as jerky as the frame rate suggests.

Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering were controlled from inside the game, and thus drivers were left set to "Application Controlled".

Below is a table of the best-playable settings that we found best for each video card configuration. We decided that a minimum frame rate of around 15 frames per second and an average of over 40 frames per second would deliver a good gaming experience throughout the rest of the title.

In F.E.A.R., we found that the PowerColor Radeon X1900XT was almost as fast as the Radeon X1900XTX video cards. As we found in our Radeon X1900 family review, the new Radeon X1900-series cards can play the game smoothly at a higher resolution than the GeForce 7800 GTX 512.

The only real difference between the Radeon X1900XTX and Radeon X1900XT was the fact that we had to turn off performance adaptive antialiasing in order to attain a smooth frame rate in the title. This meant that it was possible to play the game with no hitching or low frame rates on the X1900XT at 1600x1200 2xAA 16xHQ AF with maximum in-game details.

The All-In-Wonder X1900 was not quite as fast as the GeForce 7800 GTX 512, but it was still capable of delivering a smooth gaming experience at 1280x960 with 2xPA AA and 16xHQ AF. This is no slouch by any stretch of the imagination and we were pretty pleased with the performance of this card, considering that it costs quite a bit less than the other cards.