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 GPUs. 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.








Performance in F.E.A.R. is also respectable on the BFGTech GeForce 8600 GTS OC2, with just about playable frame rates at up to 1280x1024 with anti-aliasing enabled and smooth frame rates at 1680x1050 without AA. SLI also scales well in this title, and despite delivering respectable performance at the resolutions and settings tested here, it's not enough to challenge Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB.