GPU Shoot-Out – Part II – Setting New Benches
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, showcasing a powerful particle system, complete with showers of sparks, puffs of smoke and dust for collisions with objects and walls as well as including bullet marks on walls and other visual effects including “soft shadows”. This is well highlighted in the built-in performance test although it was never updated. This performance test will tell you how F.E.A.R. and its first expansion Extraction Point will run, but Perseus Mandate is more demanding on your PC graphics. We always run 2 sets of tests with all in-games features at ‘maximum’ – one featuring “soft shadows” and the other with 4xAA instead, as they do not run well together. F.E.A.R. uses the Jupiter Extended Technology engine from Touchdown Entertainment. Lithtech was initially developed inside Monolith Productions; later on, the team that worked on the game engine was detached from Monolith into a separate group, Touchdown Entertainment
F.E.A.R. Benchmarks
First we test at 19×12 with no AA but with Soft shadows enabled:
now with AA/No SS
let’s try again at 16×10:
No surprises here. Even crossfireX-3 scales pretty well.
