Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra

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 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.


F.E.A.R showed a frame rate benefit of 11.4 percent at 1600x1200 4xAA with the GeForce 8800 Ultra, which doesn’t come as much of a surprise because it has always been pretty heavy on memory bandwidth – this merely proves the point. The frame rates are very high though, so you’re not going to see any true benefits in game.

At 1920x1200 4xAA, we saw a similar increase and, again, the frame rates were too high for this to make a big difference to the overall gameplay experience. At 2560x1600 2xAA, the Ultra’s performance advantage over the 8800 GTX dropped to just under 9 percent as bandwidth was less of an issue. However, with 4xAA enabled at the same resolution, the performance advantage was over 13 percent – that’s quite a healthy increase and should allow F.E.A.R. to be much more playable at these settings.