Sapphire Radeon X1800XL

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 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. 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 45 frames per second would deliver a good 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.

Soft shadows really kills the performance on all of these video cards, so we found that it was best to leave that disabled in all cases. Seeing as most of the game is fairly dark, based on our experiences with both the single and multiplayer demos, we decided that a higher resolution was more appreciable than low resolution with Anti-Aliasing. This may change when the full retail game comes out - it all depends on how the rest of the game feels in comparison to the two demos that are available at the moment.

We found that 1280x960 0xAA with all details set to maximum - with the exception of Soft Shadows - was the best resolution for all of these video cards to play the game at. If you wanted to apply Anti-Aliasing, you would need to drop the resolution to 1024x768 to avoid major hitching in the more intense parts of the game.

Sapphire's Radeon X1800XL was equal to the XFX GeForce 7800 GT Extreme in this title and both were playable at 1280x960 0xAA 16xAF. We tried to enable High Quality AF on the Sapphire X1800XL, but we found that the performance drop was too great in this title. Interestingly, the Sapphire Radeon X1800XL had a much lower average frame rate than the XFX 7800 GT Extreme at these settings, but the minimum frame rate was exactly the same and it actually felt smoother too.

Curiously, we plotted a frame rate against time graph which actually showed that the Sapphire card had much smoother game play, despite having an average frame rate some 11 frames per second slower than what the XFX 7800 GT kicked out. This proves to show that average frame rates aren't everything - we'd take the Sapphire X1800XL over the XFX in this title, simply because it felt smoother and our frame rate over time graphs proved that this was the case too.

The BFGTech 7800 GT OC delivered its best possible gaming experience at 1280x960 0xAA 8xAF, while we had to drop the Anisotropic Filtering from 8x to 4x on the reference 7800 GT in order to keep relatively smooth game play. Neither was as smooth in this game as the XFX 7800 GT or Sapphire X1800XL.