High Performance Gaming on a Budget: Athlon II vs. Phenom II vs. Q9550S

F.E.A.R.

F.E.A.R. – First Encounter Armed Assault – is a DX9c game by Monolith Productions that was originally released in October 2005 by Vivendi Universal Production. Later, there were two expansions with the latest, Perseus Mandate, released in 2007. Although the game engine is aging a bit, it still has some of the most spectacular effects of any game. F.E.A.R. showcases a powerful particle system, complete with sparks and smoke for collisions as well as featuring bullet marks and other effects including “soft shadows”. This is highlighted by the built-in performance test, although it was never updated. This performance test will tell you how F.E.A.R. will run, but both of its expansions are progressively more demanding on your PC graphics and will run slower than the demo. We always run at least two sets of tests with all in-game features at ‘maximum’. F.E.A.R. uses the Jupiter Extended Technology engine from Touchdown Entertainment.

We test with the most demanding settings. Fully maxed details with 4xAA/16xAF; soft shadows ‘off’, as they do not play well with AA. Let’s start again first at 1920×1200 with the HD 4870-X2:

Now at 1920×1200 with the GTX 280:

Now at 1680×1050 with our HD 4870-X2:

Finally with the GTX 280 at 1680×1050 resolution:

In this case, our GTX 280 has the best minimum framerates as the HD 4870-X2 still appears to be having driver issues and some hiccups with its minimums as it did with the earlier Catalyst drivers.   Even so, there  is only 4 frames per second difference between the fastest and the slowest CPU. vHere we see that our GTX 280 si scoring within two frames per second on the minimums from the slowest clocked Athlon II compared to our overclocked Q9550S at 4.0 GHz.  There is really no practical difference you will see playing F.E.A.R. with any CPU combination we used.