Gainward Ultra/3500PCX Golden Sample

F.E.A.R. - single player demo

Publisher: VU Games

We are using the F.E.A.R. public demo that was released last Friday. It is on course to become the best shooter of 2005. The game makes use of a lot of shadows - 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 a massive 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 - the inclusion of parallax mapping really helps to make the destructible world look incredibly real too.

In general, this is a pretty graphically intense game and the most outstanding part of the graphics engine is undoubtably the player character's shadow that is cast on the wall. There are times when you turn around and shoot your own shadow because the game gets that far under your skin.

F.E.A.R. 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 played this demo yet, it's well worth a look - check out our F.E.A.R. preview here.

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. In this title, we experienced a lot of hitching and found that the frame rate could regularly jump in to the mid teens. We feel that the drivers need some work before the game is released in order to remove the hitching we were experiencing at all resolutions on any video card that we threw at this title.

We decided that a minimum frame rate of around 15 frames per second and an average of over 60 frames per second would deliver the best-possible gaming experience in the circumstances. This was not what we would call smooth gaming, but it was about as smooth as possible given the issues we were having in achieving smooth game play. We just hope that the drivers are fixed in time for the full release of this game.

As we have already mentioned, F.E.A.R. is an absolute mother for bringing a high-end video card to its knees, but we feel that things will improve between now and when the full version of game is released later this year, as both ATI and NVIDIA have got time to work together with Monolith to hopefully remove a large portion of the hitching that we have experienced while playing this game.

We didn't see a difference in best-playable settings between the overclocked Gainward GeForce 7800 GTX Golden Sample and the reference-clocked GeForce 7800 GTX, but we did feel that the Gainward card delivered a much smoother gaming experience. Both the average and minimum frame rates were notably higher on the Gainward Golden Sample. We also felt that there were fewer instances where we experienced hitching - in short, the game play was a lot smoother. Both cards were playable at 1280x960 2x TRMS AA 8xAF with Maximum details apart from the performance-killing soft shadows option.

The HIS Radeon X850 XT PE really chugged along very gingerly and we were only able to attain a relatively smooth gaming experience at 1024x768 0xAA 8xAF with Lighting and Shadow details set to Medium. Of course, we also had to disable soft shadows - we've not found any hardware fast enough to utilise the soft shadows option in this game thus far. It might be possible with a pair of overclocked GeForce 7800 GTX's - unfortunately we don't have a pair at the moment so we cannot confirm this for the time being.

The XFX GeForce 6800 GT SLI also chugged along, and due to the game not having an SLI profile at the moment, we had to enable the coolbits hack which allows you to force an SLI mode in all games. If you go in to regedit and go to 'HKLM/Software/NVIDIA Corp./Global/NVTweak' and create a new DWord called 'Coolbits' with the decimal value '8', you will be able to force an SLI mode for every game that doesn't have an optimised profile, as shown below:

We found that AFR was the best mode by a couple of frames per second on both average and minimum frame rates. Those of you with a slower CPU may find that Split Frame Rendering delivers the best performance in this title, though.