F.E.A.R

We love F.E.A.R. Not only is it easily the most visually stunning First Person Shooter currently out there, it is excessively easy to benchmark. Thanks to the built-in “Test Settings” feature, users can benchmark the game very easily to see how well their system does. While being majestically beautiful at the highest possible settings, the game looks pretty darn ugly when everything is turned off. As such, we would expect it to be very CPU-limited on the low end. Another great thing about F.E.A.R is that it is extremely sensitive to changes in your system. Increasing the clock speed of your processor almost always results in a representative increase in frame rates. Increasing the load on your processor almost always results in a representative decrease in frame rates. Unfortunately, however, F.E.A.R is still a single-threaded game, meaning we probably won’t be seeing any performance increases with the QX6700.




As you can see, the X6800 consistently outperforms the QX6700, even when the latter is overclocked to even the playing field. This is almost certainly due to the memory throughput and latency issues we uncovered earlier. There may be several readers out there that are so incredibly on top of things that they realized that these numbers are not very consistent with the performance numbers we presented when testing the X6800 in F.E.A.R as part of our initial Core 2 Duo review. You are absolutely correct if you noticed this; not only is there a difference, but there is a pretty big difference. Since the hardware being used here is not radically different -- in fact it is identical with the exception of a slightly updated motherboard -- we can only attribute this difference to software differences. Possible software differences include video driver updates and different game versions.