F.E.A.R.

The final game we tested on was F.E.A.R. In our initial conversations with Bigfoot, and now on the KillerNIC website, F.E.A.R is somewhat touted as the big game for the KillerNIC. Bigfoot’s in-house performance evaluation of the card revealed increases in F.E.A.R by as much as roughly 10%. This is HUGE in a game like F.E.A.R that is extremely demanding on the graphics and CPU subsystems. With this in mind, we were somewhat disappointed with the results we achieved in F.E.A.R, as they were a bit less than expected.


It’s not 10%, but it’s not something to scoff at either. 6.7% is still a very good number when it comes to F.E.A.R. which, as previously stated, is a very demanding game. The magnitude of this improvement is similar to what you might expect from lightly overclocking your processor, or upgrading your CPU to the next model altogether. That being said, many gamers are working with computers from system integrators containing crippled BIOSes that disallow overclocking; popping in a KillerNIC could be one of their better options for increasing FPS.

Our ping tests for F.E.A.R. seem to show a slight improvement when using the KillerNIC, but only to the order of about a tenth of a millisecond, registering as less than a 1% improvement.


We also tested the PingThrottle feature, and it raised our ping by about 40ms. It definitely works, but we’re still having a hard time believing that there are gamers among us who would willingly do such a thing.

Before

After