Big GPU Shootout – Revisited

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:

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:

Now at 1440×900 with the midrange cards:

In this case, our GTX 280 has the best minimum frame rates as the HD 4870-X2 appears to be having driver issues and some hiccups with its minimums as it did with Catalyst 9-4; even the single-GPU video cards, the HD 4870 and the HD 4890 beat it, but it also excels in the averages and maximums. Clearly, the HD 4890 is solidly faster than the HD 4870 but there is no practical difference playing with any of our video card configurations – except perhaps for the aging HD 2900 XT.