F.E.A.R

When F.E.A.R hit the scene last year, everyone was really impressed at the visual effects the game had to offer. Unfortunately for most, however, being able to actually make the game playable required turning down the graphics settings significantly, sacrificing image quality and superb lighting effects for increased frame rates. If you haven’t yet experienced the game of F.E.A.R at its highest level of detail, let us be the first to tell you that you are missing out, big time. To make the game as CPU limited as possible, we first turned the details all the way down to minimum in the Performance options. Our test method was the use of the built in “Test Settings” feature. We feel this playback is very characteristic of actual in-game play, and we could not, for that matter, find a section of the single player game that was any more taxing to the system than the playback.




Those are some pretty high numbers right there. Try not to focus on the Maximum FPS figure; we just put those there because having over 700 frames in a game like F.E.A.R is something to brag about, even on low settings. Instead, pay attention to the values for Average FPS. 345 FPS at high resolution is pretty amazing, and low settings do not make the game look TOO bad.

Next, we cranked up the game details to Medium and then adjusted resolutions for each test.




F.E.A.R at medium settings looks absolutely amazing. You are sacrificing some of the volumetric fog effects and some texture details and lighting simplification, but that does not make the game look much less spectacular. It is very interesting to note that the scores for the highest resolution for each processor were identical, and remember, these numbers are the average of three tests. This suggests that this is the point where F.E.A.R becomes limited on the graphics card.

Of course we couldn’t live with ourselves if we didn’t test out the processors with maximum detail, so we did.




These numbers are really high. Really really high. Playing F.E.A.R with the lights off, on high resolution, maximum settings, and averaging over 60 FPS is an experience that can only be described as.. um… really scary.