BFG 7600 GT OC and ATI X1800GTO

F.E.A.R.

Publisher: VU Games

We used the full retail version of F.E.A.R. patched to version 1.03. The game makes use of a lot of effects - including soft shadows, volumetric lighting, parallax mapping and particle effects, along with a slow-motion mode that really taxes today's top of the line GPU's. There's extensive use of high resolution textures. The walls are both bump mapped and parallax mapped to give a realistic feel to the brick walls that are a big feature of this title. Also, the world is incredibly destructible, which is made more realistic by parallax mapping.

In general, this is a graphically intense game and the most outstanding part of the graphics engine is undoubtedly the player character's shadow that is cast on the wall.

It also has the most advanced A.I. that we have ever seen in a game engine to date - there are times when you'll find yourself with your pants down around your ankles with no where to go. For anyone who hasn't bought this game yet, we highly recommend you do - check out our full review here.

We did a manual run-through from the "Heavy Resistance" level, between two save game checkpoints - it was a section of intense outdoor gameplay that lasted around three and a half minutes. We recorded frame over time graphs for all of our manual run-throughs because we found that the SloMo mode dropped our frame rates in to the low teens. We suspect this drop is part of Monolith's technique for slowing down the gameplay, as the game was not as jerky as the frame rate suggests.

Antialiasing and anisotropic filtering were controlled from inside the game, and thus drivers were left set to "Application Controlled".

Both the BFG Tech GeForce 7600 GT OC and the ATI Radeon X1800GTO were playable at the same in-game settings: 1280x1024 0xAA 8xAF with high computer options, medium graphics options with volumetric lighting enabled and set to medium quality. On the whole, this gave a pretty good gaming experience on both the BFG Tech GeForce 7600 GT OC and the Radeon X1800GTO. There is very little to choose between the two in terms of gameplay and you'd be pushed to tell the difference in a blind taste test.

F.E.A.R. is a pretty damn intensive title and it's hard to use antialiasing in conjunction with a reasonable level of detail. If you're wanting to play this game on one of these cards with antialiasing enabled, you're going to have to reduce the in-game details down to something close to the minimum quality settings, which we don't advise.

The ATI Radeon X850XT was slighty faster than the Leadtek GeForce 6800 GS Extreme, as we found that we had to turn volumetric lighting off on the latter. There are times when the volumetric lighting effect does give an immersive edge to the gameplay experience. We found that we also had to lower the anisotropic filtering quality a little in order to keep the frame rate high enough on both cards.