BFG Tech GeForce 7800 GS OC AGP

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 10-15 frames per second and an average of around 40 frames per second would deliver a good gaming experience throughout the rest of the title.

We found that the BFG Tech GeForce 7800 GS OC AGP gave about the same gaming experience as the Radeon X850XT in F.E.A.R., but we were able to increase the antialiasing quality ever so slightly. We found that we were able to add transparency multisampled antialiasing on top of the 4x antialiasing that was already appled to the scene. Both cards were also capable of running the game with 16x anisotropic filtering applied to give a high level of texture detail with the same level of in-game details.

The only real benefit in this game was the fact that the BFG Tech GeForce 7800 GS OC could utilise transparency multisample antialiasing over the Radeon X850XT's conventional antialiasing pattern. The average frame rates were a little lower than what we'd normally class as playable, but the frame rate remained above 25 frames per second at all times when SloMo mode was not used.

When we enabled SloMo, the frame rate on the BFG Tech GeForce 7800 GS OC dropped down to the high teens and low 20's with one occasion where the fps dropped to under 15 frames per second. There were two occasions during SloMo where the frame rate dropped below 15 frames per second on the ATI Radeon X850XT AGP, but these frame rate drops don't hugely impact the gaming experience, as we were still able to enjoy the game without hinderances caused by poor frame rates at these settings.