CrossFire-X, eXplored

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 2 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:

We see a couple of driver stumbles and irregularities with CrossFire here, but it is a pretty similar picture to all of our previous testing.

Now at 1680×1050:

In this case, the HD4870-X2 appears to be having driver issues and some hiccups with its minimums as it did with Catalyst 9-4; even the single-GPU HD4870 and the HD4890 does better.  TriFire is also weak in the minimums as it is using the 4870-X2, but it also excels in the averages and maximums. Clearly, the HD4870-XOC scales nicely when it is overclocked and it is solidly faster than the HD4870. There is no practical difference playing with any of our video card configurations.