NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB

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 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.

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 1600x1200 2xAA 16xAF with maximum in-game details, the 8800 GTS 320MB cards were faster than both the Radeon X1950 XT 256MB, and also the Radeon X1950 XTX (in the case of the pre-overclocked cards). However, we found that there was a massive drop off in performance when applying 4xAA on the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB cards, but interestingly we didn't experience the same drop on the Radeon X1950 XT 256MB and the latter ended up faster than all three 8800 GTS 320MB cards.


The same was true at 1920x1200, where EVGA's 8800 GTS 320MB Superclocked card was faster than BFGTech's 8800 GTS OC 640MB with 2xAA enabled. Again though, when 4xAA was enabled, the three 320MB 8800 GTS cards were outperformed by the Radeon X1950 XT 256MB, despite the higher memory bandwidth and larger memory footprint. Strange.

You'll be able to enjoy F.E.A.R. on all of the cards tested at 1920x1200 2xAA 16xAF, but performance is marginal on the 640MB 8800 GTS when 4xAA is applied. You're better staying away from 4xAA or lowering the in-game quality settings on everything else.

At 2560x1600 with 2xAA applied, you'll be able to play F.E.A.R. with acceptable frame rates on EVGA's GeForce 8800 GTX, but it's probably wise to lower quality settings and anti-aliasing on every other card we've compared.