No Soft Shadows and No AA/AF Performance Tests

This is the setting that we would recommend most people establish. Anisotropic filtering can be enabled for a minimal performance drop, but many people just won't have hardware that can handle soft shadows or antialiasing. Also note that we have made quite a big deal about the fact that soft shadows in this game just aren't worth it.



Without soft shadows or AA enabled, you can see that until you get to a resolution as high as about 1024x768, all of these cards get playable framerates. The X1300 Pro is the most limited of these cards and can really only play this game well at 640x480 and 800x600 without AA or soft shadows enabled. But you can see how low the framerates are in general at 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 for all the cards, giving us a first look at the graphical demands of this game. The 7800 GTX and 7800 GT get very respectable framerates at 1600x1200 though, and at this same resolution, the 6800 GT and X1800 XL are low, but still playable. 25 fps is about as low as we would consider barely "playable", but to really enjoy the gameplay, you'll want a framerate of about 35 fps. Now, let's look at what happens when we turn on 4xAA and 8xAF.

The Failure of Soft Shadows and Parallax Mapping 4xAA/8xAF Performance Tests
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  • xsilver - Thursday, October 20, 2005 - link

    6800gt's are high mid range cards, whereas the ultras are not good value pricewise... plus not many people have them

    the card that is missing is the 16 pipe last gen ATI cards, x800 pro/xt etc...
    could that card be added please?

    also, people might want a point of reference for old systems that want to see their card splutter on this game (9800pro / 5900fx) -- it would be great to see if these cards are still playable since they are using ps2.0 and generally older tech
  • ZobarStyl - Thursday, October 20, 2005 - link

    Because more people have GT's than Ultras and it's not too terribly hard to extrapolate out the change between the two.
  • Bingo13 - Thursday, October 20, 2005 - link

    Very good article, would 2gb of ram help in this game as it does in BF2?
  • DerekWilson - Thursday, October 20, 2005 - link

    this game is very GPU limited, as you can tell by how steeply the resolution scaling graphs drop off. The game won't run at over 1600x1200 without a little hacking.

    We will look into testing with more RAM, but our initial thought is that performance (especially at higher resolutions or with AA enabled) will not be incredibly affected by RAM. We will update the article if we find anything.
  • Z3dd - Friday, October 21, 2005 - link

    What about http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/video/giga-1.h...">this issue?
    Scoll down to the analasysis of local videomemory usage in F.E.A.R.

    Though their conclusion is that F.E.A.R is so taxing on the GPU that you won't
    notice that your card runs out of local memory.
  • Thatguy97 - Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - link

    lol i can 80 fps at 10 by 7 on integrated now
  • Thatguy97 - Wednesday, June 24, 2015 - link

    this game shit all over my x800 xl :((((((

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