Introducing AMD’s HD 6970 and HD 6950
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, 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 this game with the most demanding settings. We use fully maxed details with 4xAA/16xAF; soft shadows ‘off’, as they do not play well with AA.
Let’s start first at 2560×1600:
Now we move on to 1920×1200 resolution:
None of our cards have issues with this game at the highest settings and resolution although the HD 4870 drops off in the minimums and the GTX 580 stands out as the fastest card although the HD 6970 nearly catches it at 1920×1200 and surpasses the GTX 480 and the GTX 470 at both resolutions. Not so surprisingly, the GTX 280 still puts in a good showing against the GTX 460s. The HD 5870 is a couple of frames faster than the GTX 570 and the HD 6870 is a frame slower. There is not much difference in practically playing F.E.A.R. between the fastest and the slowest video cards as the minimums are already sufficiently high at 1920×1200. The HD 6950 puts in a good showing as the third fastest overall card in this old DX9 benchmark.
Thanks for such an extensive and thorough review, great job! Really enjoyed it. Personally, I feel a little disappointed with 6970 performance, I guess I was expecting a match to GTX580, or better. I have a feeling a lot of people had similar expectations. Oh, well… can’t blame 580 for being a stronger card. But considering the super-competitive pricing point of the new AMD flagship (which also came as a big surprise) it’s safe to say that HD6970 is also a winner in it’s own weight category and will make a lot of gamers very happy.
I’m a bit disappointed, too. The GTX 570 currently has the better performance/price ratio but the 6900 series still offers great ratio…just not as good as GTX 570.
Many people will be pleased nonetheless
The settings pic on the GTA 4 page is missing.
Thank-you. There are still a few images that are still going to be uploaded.
The settings for GTA-IV are all at “high” and 100%.
Apologies for the delay; we had issues with our under-NDA images that stopped us from uploading any further images after the evaluation was published; the permissions were just fixed yesterday.
FIXED.
u should turn on the a.i catalyst to quality as its the default graphic settings for ati graphic cards.
No PC gamer should buy an expensive graphics card to run its IQ settings at less than High Quality.
We test Nvidia vs AMD *both* at High Quality settings. You can always lower the settings yourself and gain a bit more performance if you like.
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