GeForce 7950 GX2 Retail Round-up

For gameplay evaluations on a 24" widescreen monitor, please head straight to our widescreen performance section.

F.E.A.R.

Publisher: VU Games

We used the full retail version of F.E.A.R. patched to version 1.04. 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".

When using a CRT, there were no image quality advantages from buying the higher-clocked XFX GeForce 7950 GX2 570M XXX Edition video card over one clocked at NVIDIA's reference clock speeds in F.E.A.R.. Both GeForce 7950 GX2 speed grades were capable of incredibly good looking and smooth gameplay with 4x transparency supersampling anti-aliasing enabled and maximum in game details.

The only difference between the two speed grades was that the higher clocked XFX 570M XXX Edition was slightly smoother, delivering a higher minimum and average frame rate. The differences in gameplay experience between these cards were slight, though.

Both the BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC and Radeon X1900XTX were playable at 1600x1200 with 2xAA 16xAF enabled. The BFG Tech 7900 GTX OC had transparency supersampling enabled, while the Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX had the equivalent quality adaptive anti-aliasing turned on. Also, the Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX had high quality anisotropic filtering enabled; however, there were no noticeable differences in image quality between 'high quality' drivers in the NVIDIA control panel and ATI's HQ AF option.