ATI Radeon X1800XT 512MB

Author: Tim Smalley
Published: 11th November 2005

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F.E.A.R.

Publisher: VU Games

We used the full retail version of F.E.A.R. patched to version 1.02. 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 GPU's. 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 no where to go. For anyone who hasn't bought this game yet, we highly recommend you do - check out our full review here.

We did a manual run-through from the "Heavy Resistance" level, between two save game checkpoints - it was a section of intense outdoor gameplay that lasted around three and a half minutes. We recorded frame over time graphs for all of our manual run-throughs because we found that the SloMo mode dropped our frame rates in to the low teens. We suspect this drop is part of Monolith's technique for slowing down the gameplay, as the game was not as jerky as the frame rate suggests.

Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering were controlled from inside the game, and thus drivers were left set to "Application Controlled".

Below is a table of the best-playable settings that we found best for each video card configuration. We decided that a minimum frame rate of around 15 frames per second and an average of over 40 frames per second would deliver a good gaming experience throughout the rest of the title.

X1800XT 512MB Best Playable Settings - F.E.A.R.

There is currently a bug in ATI's drivers that has been present since the launch of Radeon X1000-series. It's not a bug related to image quality - the image quality delivered by the ATI Radeon X1800XT is as good as the NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX at the same settings. Instead, the bug is actually related to performance.

ATI's Terry 'Catalyst' Makedon stated that "It's a bug, in that we simply got an IF statement backwards. Of course there is no difference in rendering, it's just a Catalyst AI game specific optimisation that was good for the demo version, but backfired for the final version. We will get it sorted out in a future Catalyst (not 5.11, which is being posted tomorrow by the way)."

We did manual run throughs with Catalyst AI on and Catalyst AI off, to find some interesting numbers. The Radeon X1800XT delivered an average frame rate of 42 frames per second with Catalyst AI turned on, and that increased to 46 frames per second with Catalyst AI turned off. The minimum frame rate remained the same during both run throughs at 13 frames per second.

However, when Catalyst AI was turned off, we felt that the game wasn't quite as smooth through the larger of the two firefights in our manual run through. The second, smaller firefight was noticeably smoother when Catalyst AI was turned off. If we had a combination of the two, we'd have a very smooth gaming experience throughout the title. For now, we'd probably recommend leaving Catalyst AI turned on - the larger firefights were smoother, and we feel that the larger firefights are more important, frame rate wise.

The XFX GeForce 7800 GTX came close to the performance of the Radeon X1800XT, but overall the Radeon X1800XT delivered a slightly smoother gaming experience in this title. However, in a blind taste test, you're undoubtedly not going to notice the difference between these two video cards at their highest playable settings.

The Radeon X1800XT was faster than the reference GeForce 7800 GTX. We were only able to experience smooth gaming at 1280x960 2xAA 8xAF, in comparison to the 1280x960 2xQA AA 16xAF settings that were playable on the X1800XT. Given the choice, we'd take the Radeon X1800XT in this title, but the XFX GeForce 7800 GTX Extreme Gamer Edition doesn't look like a particularly bad purchase either.