The battle of the HTPC cards, Galaxy’s GT 520 vs. HD 6450 (GDDR5 vs. GDDR3)

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 1920×1200:

These two new cards are completely overwhelmed by this game at 1920×1600. It is not so old that F.E.A.R. cannot put a real hurt on entry-level gaming cards. We see the new HD 6450 is slower than the GT 520 and it completely overwhelms its replacement, the GT 420. However, the GTX 430 plays a spoiler.

Let’s look at 1280×720 and drop the AA to 2x:

In this old DX9 game, the GTX 520 is much faster than the HIS 6450. The new Radeon would have to not only drop resolution further, it would also have to drop details or AA although the GDDR5 version of HD 6450 beats our overclocked GT 520 in the summary.