GeCube Radeon X1800XT 512MB

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.

Antialiasing 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.

With GeCube's X1800XT, we were able to enjoy the game with 4xAA and 16xHQ AF enabled at 1280x960. This was slightly surprising, because the X1800XT performed a little slower than this back in November. There was a bug in Catalyst 5.11 that meant the performance wasn't quite where it should be - it's safe to say that they've managed to fix the performance-hampering bug, and the Radeon X1800XT performs really well in F.E.A.R.

Even more surprising was the fact that, despite the improved maths capabilities of R580, the lower-clocked All-In-Wonder X1900 didn't have enough juice to out-perform the Radeon X1800XT. The All-In-Wonder was not fast enough to play the game at 1280x960 with 4xAA and maximum in-game details, so we settled for 2xPA AA and 16xHQ AF.

The Gainward Ultra/3500PCX Golden Sample (GeForce 7800 GTX) was able to play the game at similar settings to what we found to be optimal on the All-In-Wonder X1900. We were able to increase the antialiasing quality a little, but the anisotropic filtering quality was superior on ATI's feature-packed multimedia monster by virtue of the fact that it was capable of utilising ATI's high quality filtering algorithm.

Finally, PowerColor's X1900XT was in another league, as it was capable of delivering completely smooth gameplay at 1600x1200 2xAA 16xHQ AF with maximum in-game details. Even at the higher settings, the Radeon X1900XT delivered a smoother gaming experience than any of the other cards we have compared here.