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 GPUs. 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.








At the quality settings we've tested here, the Radeon X1950 Pro is a faster video card than the XFX GeForce 8600 GT XXX Edition, but it's questionable whether you'll actually get any benefits from the higher frame rates - at least, when anti-aliasing is disabled. Our past experiments with F.E.A.R. have proven that you need around 60 frames per second in the built-in performance test to attain a smooth frame rate in the game.

With 0xAA enabled at 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1680x1050, both of these cards deliver playable frame rates. However, things get a little more interesting once anti-aliasing is enabled. XFX's pre-overclocked 8600 GT manages smooth gameplay at 1024x768 4xAA 16xAF, but falls behind the X1950 Pro by a large margin at both 1280x1024 and 1680x1050.