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 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. We set everything to Maximum with no anti-aliasing, anisotropy or soft shadows.





First of all, in F.E.A.R. we're running in excess of 100fps even at the highest resolution so regardless of what platform you use, it seems only the more recent games can affect more recent hardware. In all there is very little difference across the board, and even though the dual x16 X38 board even comes out "slower" in a couple of tests it's well within experimental error, even though we've averaged three runs. Change the memory timings, overclock just a touch and any core performance difference is out the window.