Leadtek Duo PX6600GT TDH Extreme

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

Publisher: VU Games

We used the F.E.A.R. public demo, as it is on course to become the most intensive 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 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 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. We decided that a minimum frame rate of around 15 frames per second and an average of over 55 frames per second would deliver the best-possible gaming experience on these mid-range cards. This was not what we would call creamy smooth gaming, but it was about as smooth as possible given the issues we were having in achieving smooth game play with 1GB of memory.

Due to the game not having an SLI profile at the moment, we had to enable the Coolbits hack that 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 we showed in our Gainward GeForce 7800 GTX review. We found that AFR was the best mode with Leadtek's Duo PX6600GT Extreme, although those of you with a slower CPU may find that Split Frame Rendering delivers the best performance in this title.

We found that the Leadtek Duo PX6600GT Extreme was playable at the same settings as we found best-playable for the Club 3D Radeon X800 XL. If we had the choice here, we'd take the Radeon X800 XL over the dual 6600 GT card simply because of the large difference between the minimum frame rate.

The average frame rate on the Radeon X800 XL was six frames per second lower than what was recorded on the Leadtek Duo PX6600GT Extreme, but the minimum frame rate also had a six frames per second difference. The Leadtek Duo PX6600GT Extreme was very close to unplayable, with the minimum frame rate dropping to 13 frames per second in one instance.

However, the GeForce 6800 GT was the pick of the bunch in this title, as we were able to increase the details to levels that we've previously found to be best playable on the Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition. All details were set to their maximum value with the exception of lighting and shadows, which were both set to Medium. The minimum frame rate was a healthy fifteen frames per second, while the average frame rate was an equally healthy 59 frames per second.

Unfortunately, we couldn't enable soft shadows on any of these video cards, as the performance hit was too great.