F.E.A.R. GPU Performance Tests: Setting a New Standard
by Josh Venning on October 20, 2005 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Game/Test setup
There was a lot of hype about FEAR before it was released, which is common for ground-breaking games of this sort. Too much hype can be a bad thing as we've seen before with other games, and while it may have some similarities to the movies, we aren't quite willing to put FEAR on the same level as The Ring and The Matrix, in spite of the dramatic slow motion deaths and the scary looking little girl.
In this case, though, FEAR more or less lives up to the hype, and what we have here is possibly the most beautiful looking, first-person shooter that we've ever seen. The dark and moody atmosphere and lighting are nice, reminiscent of Doom 3 except that you can actually see most of the time. During heated action sequences, the combination of lighting effects from things like muzzle flashes and sparks from bullet ricochets, as well as dust that falls from wall shots creating hazy clouds create a beautiful scene of chaos. This is further enhanced by the much-copied (but still fun) bullet-time/reflex mode, which slows everything down so that the chaos of sparks, dust and bodies flying through the air resemble some bizarre ballet that will occasionally make you pause to marvel at its beauty. Other graphical elements worth mentioning are the fire effects, which are impressive, compared to most other games, as are the water effects (reflections, ripples and caustics).
To be fair, a few things could have looked better in the game. While the levels are pretty, they can be repetitive, as can the enemies, which are mostly hordes of a few different variations of clone soldiers, and the effectiveness of the games parallax mapped environment damage is not up to snuff. These are just a few complaints, however, and graphically, the good stuff more than outweighs the bad. Further more, because the enemy AI is so smart and action so intense, you'll be so caught up in gameplay that the small graphical problems won't matter much.
Not only is this the best looking game out right now, but it also happens to be the most graphically demanding, as we will see in our performance tests. It's so demanding in fact that it could be a good reason for people to upgrade their graphics card. FEAR only supports resolutions of up to 1600x1200, but only the highest end cards can handle this resolution well, especially with soft shadows and/or AA enabled. In fact, this may be the first game that puts the 7800 GTX to its full use, as our tests showed at 1600x1200 with soft shadows and AA enabled FEAR was barely playable.
We wanted to get an idea about how FEAR performs across a wide range of graphics cards, so we tested a good sample of high end and mid-range cards. These are the kind of cards that we could see paired with our high end test system.
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT
ATI Radeon X1800 XT (not yet available)
ATI Radeon X1800 XL
ATI Radeon X1600 XT (not yet available)
ATI Radeon X1300 Pro
ATI Radeon X800 GT
We also tested all resolutions possible up to 1600x1200, the highest that FEAR will run, with and without 4xAA and 8xAF enabled. FEAR gives the option to turn on a feature called soft shadows, which we will talk about later, and because of some issues that we saw with this, we ran benchmarks with and without this enabled. All other options were turned up to their maximum quality level. For those of you with older mid-range and lower end cards, maximal detail is not really an option at any resolution.
This is our test system:
NVIDIA nForce 4 motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 2.6 GHz Processor
1 GB OCZ 2:2:2:6 DDR400 RAM
Seagate 7200.7 120 GB Hard Drive
OCZ 600 W PowerStream Power Supply
We also made sure to test with sound disabled. This test isn't as strict a test of graphics performance as some of our other benchmarks. For one, we used the built-in test feature. While this gives us a consistent "run" through a scene, physics variability and slight differences in what the characters in the scene do are apparent. This is similar to the Far Cry test if Crytek had added physics cues to the camera path of their benchmark.
While we would like to see more consistent action in order to compare cards better, the built-in tool is a much better option than using fraps while running through a level. As mentioned, we tested three different game settings. Driver settings were all default except for VSYNC, which was explicitly disabled.
Before we get to the numbers, let's take a deeper look at some of the graphics and performance issues that we noted previously.
There was a lot of hype about FEAR before it was released, which is common for ground-breaking games of this sort. Too much hype can be a bad thing as we've seen before with other games, and while it may have some similarities to the movies, we aren't quite willing to put FEAR on the same level as The Ring and The Matrix, in spite of the dramatic slow motion deaths and the scary looking little girl.
In this case, though, FEAR more or less lives up to the hype, and what we have here is possibly the most beautiful looking, first-person shooter that we've ever seen. The dark and moody atmosphere and lighting are nice, reminiscent of Doom 3 except that you can actually see most of the time. During heated action sequences, the combination of lighting effects from things like muzzle flashes and sparks from bullet ricochets, as well as dust that falls from wall shots creating hazy clouds create a beautiful scene of chaos. This is further enhanced by the much-copied (but still fun) bullet-time/reflex mode, which slows everything down so that the chaos of sparks, dust and bodies flying through the air resemble some bizarre ballet that will occasionally make you pause to marvel at its beauty. Other graphical elements worth mentioning are the fire effects, which are impressive, compared to most other games, as are the water effects (reflections, ripples and caustics).
To be fair, a few things could have looked better in the game. While the levels are pretty, they can be repetitive, as can the enemies, which are mostly hordes of a few different variations of clone soldiers, and the effectiveness of the games parallax mapped environment damage is not up to snuff. These are just a few complaints, however, and graphically, the good stuff more than outweighs the bad. Further more, because the enemy AI is so smart and action so intense, you'll be so caught up in gameplay that the small graphical problems won't matter much.
Not only is this the best looking game out right now, but it also happens to be the most graphically demanding, as we will see in our performance tests. It's so demanding in fact that it could be a good reason for people to upgrade their graphics card. FEAR only supports resolutions of up to 1600x1200, but only the highest end cards can handle this resolution well, especially with soft shadows and/or AA enabled. In fact, this may be the first game that puts the 7800 GTX to its full use, as our tests showed at 1600x1200 with soft shadows and AA enabled FEAR was barely playable.
We wanted to get an idea about how FEAR performs across a wide range of graphics cards, so we tested a good sample of high end and mid-range cards. These are the kind of cards that we could see paired with our high end test system.
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT
ATI Radeon X1800 XT (not yet available)
ATI Radeon X1800 XL
ATI Radeon X1600 XT (not yet available)
ATI Radeon X1300 Pro
ATI Radeon X800 GT
We also tested all resolutions possible up to 1600x1200, the highest that FEAR will run, with and without 4xAA and 8xAF enabled. FEAR gives the option to turn on a feature called soft shadows, which we will talk about later, and because of some issues that we saw with this, we ran benchmarks with and without this enabled. All other options were turned up to their maximum quality level. For those of you with older mid-range and lower end cards, maximal detail is not really an option at any resolution.
This is our test system:
NVIDIA nForce 4 motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 2.6 GHz Processor
1 GB OCZ 2:2:2:6 DDR400 RAM
Seagate 7200.7 120 GB Hard Drive
OCZ 600 W PowerStream Power Supply
We also made sure to test with sound disabled. This test isn't as strict a test of graphics performance as some of our other benchmarks. For one, we used the built-in test feature. While this gives us a consistent "run" through a scene, physics variability and slight differences in what the characters in the scene do are apparent. This is similar to the Far Cry test if Crytek had added physics cues to the camera path of their benchmark.
While we would like to see more consistent action in order to compare cards better, the built-in tool is a much better option than using fraps while running through a level. As mentioned, we tested three different game settings. Driver settings were all default except for VSYNC, which was explicitly disabled.
Before we get to the numbers, let's take a deeper look at some of the graphics and performance issues that we noted previously.
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Sunrise089 - Thursday, October 20, 2005 - link
Lack of testing at different graphics settings - badLack of soft shadows + AA testing - sort of bad
Lack of SLI testing - quite bad
Lack of an older card like a 9800pro even if only to see how badly it plays - sort of bad
Testing two unavailable ATI cards while not testing ANY previous gen ATI cards - terrible
DerekWilson - Thursday, October 20, 2005 - link
We tested three different settings combinations for this game where we normally only test 2. I agree that it would have been nice to include a test with settings that allowed the midrange cards to acheive smooth framerates at high resolutions. We did test with and without the setting that has the single largest impact in framerates (soft shadows).It is not possible run the game with antialiasing and soft shadows enabled at the same time. If AA is enabled in the control panel and soft shadows are enabled in the game, Monolith notes that rendering problems will happen. AA + Soft shadows is ommited because we could not include it.
The only SLI option we currently recommend is the high end combination of 2x 7800 GTX. Rather than doubling any other product, it is a better option to upgade to a higher end solution and sell the lower performance part. Testing SLI and crossfire combinations of every card and including other X800 and 9800 series solutions would have ended up doubling our test load and our time to publication. We tried to choose well a smaller sample of cards that would present a full representation of what would happen in the mid to high end space.
And after reading the comments on this article, it is quite apparent that we chose poorly. In the future, we will include at least an X800 XT or X850 XT and a 7800 GTX SLI test.
It just isn't possible to test every setup imaginable, but rest assured that we will absolutely listen to the feedback and include at least a couple more cards and tests in future articles of this nature.
Thanks very much for your feedback,
Derek Wilson
Le Québécois - Friday, October 21, 2005 - link
Don't forget the X800XL ...For a long time this card has been the best bang for the buck you could get so its probably a card that many Anand readers have.Sunrise089 - Thursday, October 20, 2005 - link
Absolutely understand the point now about not being able to run soft shadows and AA together, sorry for calling you out on that then. For settings I meant maybe testing at Medium or High rather than whatever the Max setting is called. Thank you for caring to read my feedback, it is appreciated.dashrendar - Thursday, October 20, 2005 - link
Hey Derek,How hard is it to incorporate min/max FPS in addition to average FPS in your benchmarks? I see this info in other sites, and it really helps to see how much it dips throughout a timedemo. I think it gives a better representation of whether a game will have some or a lot of hiccups.
Thanks
DerekWilson - Thursday, October 20, 2005 - link
We will work on ways to include this data effectively. There are always more numbers to add, and not always good ways to represent that data. But we will absolutely look into it. Any suggestions on how you would like to see this data represented?9nails - Saturday, October 22, 2005 - link
I'm not saying run out and steal these graphs, but HardOCP has pretty good charts that show the frame rates over the timedemo. Pretty coolio. http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=ODU1LDM=">http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=ODU1LDM=And, please please please consider using a system that is a closer representation of that the average READER might have!!! (http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html)">http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html) Your dream gamer rigs are absurd and do not offer any represention what we READERS can expect from the game. If you're reviewing GPU's, toss some absurdly low end ones in and maybe some of your highend cards in, ***only if they can be found in local stores and/or available through your advertisers***. This gives us READERS a better idea of what some new hardware may do for our systems. If the games run like crap on older hardware, maybe these developers will learn how to write better code!? Trying to find the most amazing performance, isn't always important. Know what I mean?
fogeyman - Friday, October 21, 2005 - link
I would be fine with two charts, one for minimum and one for max. Integrating the two charts would probably make things too cluttered. As far as the specifics go, I like how you set up your charts right now. So simply duplicating the format and changing the content is great for me.Icehawk - Thursday, October 20, 2005 - link
Oh, and it hiccups like crazy on my PC...Anemone - Thursday, October 20, 2005 - link
I could have expected this kind of performance. Kudos for a decent article.The very best of both ATI and Nvidia are not even up to the task of 1600x1200 with 8AF and soft shadows. I wouldn't even want to imagine what 1920x1200 would look like(don't know if Fear can do that res or not). But it's clear to me the R580 and the G80 are obviously needed for the next generation. People often argue that GPU's of the best today are overkill. Clearly we can see that even the very best of today can be brought to its knees by a shipping game, let alone what may come in the next year.
Let's hope those newer chips don't take a year to get to us.
:)