GeForce 8800 series round-up

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.



F.E.A.R. is more fill rate limited than Company Of Heroes was because we see some quite small differences in performance between the EVGA and XFX pre-overclocked GeForce 8800 GTX cards. However, we saw some quite dramatic differences in performance between the XFX and BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB cards.

This is also highlighted by the small differences in core clock on the Leadtek and MSI GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB video cards. Both cards have the same memory and stream processor clocks, but there was a few frames per second difference in performance with both 2xAA and 4xAA at 1600x1200; this can only be put down to the 13MHz core clock increase.



The pattern continues as we increase the resolution too, as both the EVGA and XFX pre-overclocked 8800 GTX video cards are around 10 percent faster than a standard GeForce 8800 GTX at 2560x1600.