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
Final Words
As we said in our introduction, FEAR does indeed set a new standard for games, and there is no denying the quality of its graphics. Perhaps there could have been more variety in some areas, but the beauty of the action sequences can't be matched in any first-person shooter that we've seen. For graphics, FEAR paves the way for a new generation of games, and is also the first game able to bring the highest powered cards available to their knees when played at its full graphical potential.
We feel that it is important to note that we tested with products unavailable at this time. We feel that it is important to look forward at what we might be able to expect from ATI in terms of performance. At the same time, we feel that that gap between launch and availability of product at this point in the game is a huge mistake. All we need to say about the subject is that there is no reason to wait for these cards to become available based on our performance analysis.
This game alone gives players without high end monitors a real reason to justify saving up for a 7800 GTX. Those who want to play FEAR at the highest resolution and settings with AA enabled (without soft shadows) will basically have to use the 7800 GTX, as no other card available gets playable framerates at those settings, and the 7800 GTX does just barely (if uncomfortably). If you have to play at 1600x1200 and you don't care about AA, then the 7800 GT and possibly the 6800 GT will play well, as will ATI's X1800 XL. However, don't run out and buy an X1800 XL just yet because the 7800 GT runs the game better, and right now, you can buy the NVIDIA darling for less money than the X1800 XL (about $340 as opposed to $390).
FEAR looks good enough that people will enjoy the game at even the lowest resolutions, and all of the cards that we've tested will run the game fine at resolutions as high as 1024x768 without AA and soft shadows, with the exception of the X1300 PRO. This card performed the worst overall, but it still runs FEAR fine (without AA and SS) at 800x600. If you are on a shoestring budget, but need to buy one of these cards to play FEAR, a good choice would be the X800 GT for $130, or even better, the 6600 GT for about $15 more. That's not much more money considering the 6600 GT gets 31 fps at 1280x1024 compared to only 25 fps on the X800 GT, which we wouldn't waste our time. With the MSRP on the X1300 Pro sitting at about $150, we can't see how the part will sell at all given its competition.
If you are looking for a good middle-of-the-road card that could handle 1024x768 with AA enabled, the 6800 GT might be a good choice, but at $280, it might be nice to save up and get the 7800 GT ($340). Overall though, given performance and price, you'll want to stay away from both the X1800 XL and the X1300 PRO, as they just aren't practical. Keep in mind, however, that these are still very new graphics cards and prices change.
This is very old news by now, but we have to mention it yet again. The fact that ATI still has no competitor for the 7800 GTX yet means that lots of FEAR players will be looking to NVIDIA for their graphics solution. This puts ATI behind again, and with games like Quake 4 coming out soon, things are looking even worse for ATI than they already have been. We were happy to see that ATI is at least coming out with high end parts, but where is the 7800 GTX competition? We need to see the X1800 XT on shelves with a competitive price soon, or there won't be much that can help ATI, especially with the rumors about what's coming down the pipe from NVIDIA.
All that aside, our focus here is on FEAR, and while we aren't saying that this is the best game out now by any means, we are saying that it is probably the most significant, given how graphically demanding it is. Be assured that we will be giving it a much more thorough testing on the "fun-ness" factor for a while to come.
As we said in our introduction, FEAR does indeed set a new standard for games, and there is no denying the quality of its graphics. Perhaps there could have been more variety in some areas, but the beauty of the action sequences can't be matched in any first-person shooter that we've seen. For graphics, FEAR paves the way for a new generation of games, and is also the first game able to bring the highest powered cards available to their knees when played at its full graphical potential.
We feel that it is important to note that we tested with products unavailable at this time. We feel that it is important to look forward at what we might be able to expect from ATI in terms of performance. At the same time, we feel that that gap between launch and availability of product at this point in the game is a huge mistake. All we need to say about the subject is that there is no reason to wait for these cards to become available based on our performance analysis.
This game alone gives players without high end monitors a real reason to justify saving up for a 7800 GTX. Those who want to play FEAR at the highest resolution and settings with AA enabled (without soft shadows) will basically have to use the 7800 GTX, as no other card available gets playable framerates at those settings, and the 7800 GTX does just barely (if uncomfortably). If you have to play at 1600x1200 and you don't care about AA, then the 7800 GT and possibly the 6800 GT will play well, as will ATI's X1800 XL. However, don't run out and buy an X1800 XL just yet because the 7800 GT runs the game better, and right now, you can buy the NVIDIA darling for less money than the X1800 XL (about $340 as opposed to $390).
FEAR looks good enough that people will enjoy the game at even the lowest resolutions, and all of the cards that we've tested will run the game fine at resolutions as high as 1024x768 without AA and soft shadows, with the exception of the X1300 PRO. This card performed the worst overall, but it still runs FEAR fine (without AA and SS) at 800x600. If you are on a shoestring budget, but need to buy one of these cards to play FEAR, a good choice would be the X800 GT for $130, or even better, the 6600 GT for about $15 more. That's not much more money considering the 6600 GT gets 31 fps at 1280x1024 compared to only 25 fps on the X800 GT, which we wouldn't waste our time. With the MSRP on the X1300 Pro sitting at about $150, we can't see how the part will sell at all given its competition.
If you are looking for a good middle-of-the-road card that could handle 1024x768 with AA enabled, the 6800 GT might be a good choice, but at $280, it might be nice to save up and get the 7800 GT ($340). Overall though, given performance and price, you'll want to stay away from both the X1800 XL and the X1300 PRO, as they just aren't practical. Keep in mind, however, that these are still very new graphics cards and prices change.
This is very old news by now, but we have to mention it yet again. The fact that ATI still has no competitor for the 7800 GTX yet means that lots of FEAR players will be looking to NVIDIA for their graphics solution. This puts ATI behind again, and with games like Quake 4 coming out soon, things are looking even worse for ATI than they already have been. We were happy to see that ATI is at least coming out with high end parts, but where is the 7800 GTX competition? We need to see the X1800 XT on shelves with a competitive price soon, or there won't be much that can help ATI, especially with the rumors about what's coming down the pipe from NVIDIA.
All that aside, our focus here is on FEAR, and while we aren't saying that this is the best game out now by any means, we are saying that it is probably the most significant, given how graphically demanding it is. Be assured that we will be giving it a much more thorough testing on the "fun-ness" factor for a while to come.
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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.
:)