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 soft shadows, 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.








At 1280x1024 with no anti-aliasing, you'll get a respectable experience on both the Asus EN8600GT and the HIS Radeon HD 2600 XT IceQ Turbo, but the advantage is the GeForce 8600 GT's again. 1280x1024 with 4xAA isn't playable on either card, but you might be able to squeeze playable frame rates out of the GeForce 8600 GT at 1680x1050 with 0xAA. The Radeon HD 2600 XTs, on the other hand, will need quite a bit of tweaking to attain the 50-60 frames per second required for an acceptable experience in this title.