Radeon X800 GT Roundup

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

Publisher: VU Games

We are using the F.E.A.R. public demo - it is on course to become the best 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 a massive 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 - the inclusion of parallax mapping really helps to make the destructible world look incredibly real too.

In general, this is a pretty graphically intense game and the most outstanding part of the graphics engine is undoubtably the player character's shadow that is cast on the wall. There are times when you turn around and shoot your own shadow because the game gets that far under your skin.

F.E.A.R. 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 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.

We found that the Radeon X800 GTs were not quite as fast as the BFGTech GeForce 6600 GT OC in this title. The cards mainly struggled with the shadowing technique used by Monolith and as such we had to set the shadow detail to 'Minimum'. In fact, most settings were set to minimum in the graphics and effects control panels.

The game is without doubt the most intense game at the moment even considering that it is not released until later this year. Overall, we found that 1024x768 0xAA 2xAF with a 'Medium-Low' detail setting was the best that the three Radeon X800 GT's could manage.

The enhanced clock speeds on the HIS X800 GT IceQ II iTurbo allowed us to enable 4xAF while everything other detail setting remained the same. Meanwhile, the All-In-Wonder struggled to keep up with the competition due to its crippled memory bus - we had to lower the details to a minimum and turn Anisotropic Filtering off in order to attain a playable frame rate.

Finally, the BFGTech 6600 GT OC was the star of the show - we could enable the player shadow by setting shadow detail to 'Medium' while everything else remained the same as the enhanced HIS X800 GT IceQ II iTurbo running at 500/1000MHz.