Introduction

So you’re sitting there with your GeForce 4 or RADEON 8500 card, or perhaps you upgraded to a GeForce FX or RADEON 9x00 series card a few years back, and after making it through DOOM 3 and/or Half-Life 2 with your graphics card last year, you’re now looking to upgrade for Quake 4, F.E.A.R., and Call of Duty 2 this fall. If this applies to you, our series of 3D Performance articles we’ll be running over the course of the next few weeks will hopefully provide some guidance.

Up for today is our F.E.A.R. performance with mainstream graphics cards article. Since getting our hands on a beta copy of F.E.A.R. a few months ago, we’ve been throwing every new graphics card on the market at this game. As many of you have seen with the single-player and multiplayer demos VU Games released earlier this year, F.E.A.R. is capable of taxing even the latest hardware. Monolith has replaced the Jupiter engine used in their previous games such as TRON 2.0 and No One Lives Forever 2, with a completely new engine, which is filled with all kinds of eye candy.

Monolith uses high resolution normal and specular maps throughout the game’s dark environments, while particle effects are used for effects like sparks, which can go flying everywhere in the middle of a heated firefight. F.E.A.R. also features a per-pixel lighting model, just like DOOM 3 last year. It’s perhaps because of the game’s per-pixel lighting model and Monolith’s extensive use of shadows that F.E.A.R. is a game that pushes hardware like never before. Between Call of Duty 2, Quake 4, and Serious Sam II, F.E.A.R. seems to be the most taxing. This doesn’t necessarily mean F.E.A.R. is the most advanced engine out there, as the game certainly lacks support for a few key visual features, but it is something you’ll want to keep in mind before playing the game.

With this in mind, we’ve decided to buck tradition and focus on the performance of the various mainstream card offerings first, before moving on to the high-end cards like the GeForce 7800 GTX and RADEON X1800 XT (normally we go in the other direction). There were a few key topics that we wanted answers to, we’ll quickly go over them:

Topic #1: Medium Quality vs. Maximum Quality

Obviously with F.E.A.R. requiring so much graphics horsepower, the number one question gamers with lower-end cards are probably asking is what’s the difference in performance and image quality between the two settings?

We’ll provide a more in-depth response to this question in an upcoming game optimization guide, but until then we wanted a quick answer, which you’ll find in the upcoming pages. Fortunately our first impressions of the game in medium quality mode are that you don’t lose too much in terms of eye candy, but as you’ll see in the benchmarks, you don’t gain that much additional performance either. Take a look at these screenshots:

Medium quality

Max quality

Medium quality (top)

Max quality

Topic #2: 512MB vs 256MB graphics card

While this probably isn’t pertinent to the mainstream graphics card segment, we still wanted to get a quick answer to this question. Our testing with Sapphire’s RADEON X800 XL 512MB showed some pretty surprising performance gains with the 512MB board. In fact, the Sapphire X800 XL 512MB outperformed the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition once 4xAA/16xAF was turned on.

While we’re running with lower image quality settings in today’s article, we wanted to see if the same performance trends continued to hold up.