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.








A pretty woeful display by Sapphire's HD 2600 XT GDDR4 in F.E.A.R. - we can only hope that there are driver improvements in the pipeline to resolve the card's performance. However, I'm not going to hold much hope of that, because if you look at the card's performance with anti-aliasing disabled, and then look at the performance with it enabled, you'll see that you lose around 50 percent of the frame rate as a result of turning AA on.

On the other hand, the EN8600GT manages decent performance at 1024x768 with 4xAA - at higher resolutions, you're going to either have to lower in-game details, or disable anti-aliasing.