F.E.A.R. Performance

F.E.A.R. has a built in test that we make use of in this performance analysis. This test flies through some action as people shoot each other and things blow up. F.E.A.R. is very heavy on the graphics, and we enable most of the high end settings for our test.

During our testing of F.E.A.R., we noted that the "soft shadows" don't really look soft. They jumped out at us as multiple layers of transparent shadows layered on top of each other and jittered to appear soft. Unfortunately, this costs a lot in performance and not nearly enough shadows are used to make this look realistic. Thus, we disable soft shadows in our test even though its one of the large performance drains on the system.

Again we tested with antialiasing on and off and anisotropic filtering at 8x. All options were on their highest quality with the exception of soft shadows which was disabled. Frame rates for F.E.A.R. can get pretty low for a first person shooter, but the game does a good job of staying playable down to about 25 fps.

F.E.A.R.

F.E.A.R. returns to NVIDIA's 7900 GTX SLI ruling the top of the charts by 10% over the X1950 CrossFire. What's more noteworthy however is the close to 14% performance boost the X1950 CrossFire gets over the X1900 CrossFire setup, due to its 4% CrossFire card core clock speed boost and faster GDDR4 memory. Once again we see that the 7950 GX2 provides a good middle ground between the price/performance of the fastest single cards and the slowest multi-card multi-GPU setups.

Single card performance, with the exception of the GX2, is pretty close between the top contenders. The X1950 XTX is fastest but its predecessor and the 7900 GTX are not far behind. Even the X1900 XT 256MB puts out a respectable frame rate here, but it's starting to show its limits.

Without AA, nearly every configuration scales exactly the same from low resolution to high. The X1900 CrossFire score at 1280x960 is a little strange, but we confirmed the test a couple different times to make sure nothing was off. It is possible that this scaling issue is due to the lower memory clock, but we really aren't sure why we see the performance we do here. Luckily, there's no need to play at such a low resolution with a $1000 set of graphics cards.

F.E.A.R.

With AA enabled, ATI gains a small advantage over NVIDIA at the very high end with its X1950 CrossFire. The standings mostly remain the same through the rest of the charts, although the 7900 GTX and 512MB X1900 XT swap places in the single card comparisons.

With single cards able to offer playable performance at 2048 x 1536 with 4X AA, we can't wait to see what the next generation of GPUs will bring us in terms of single card performance. Or, alternatively, what game developers are going to be able to do with this much power at their disposal.

The AA graph looks even stranger than the non-AA graph. Both multi card ATI solutions hit a very strange limitation at 1280x960. This isn't a traditional, easy to explain, CPU limitation. A faster memory clock on the X1950 XTX gives it an advantage at 1280x960, and the 7900 GTX SLI has no problem reaching up over 130 fps. Again, we ran this test multiple times and decided to chalk it up to mysterious and unknown driver issues. Other than these anomalies, everything else scales similarly and nothing really trades places at any point in this test.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Performance Half-Life 2: Episode One Performance
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  • JarredWalton - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link

    Anisotropic filtering was enabled in all tests at 8xAF as far as I know. When we use antialiasing, we generally enable anisotropic filtering as well.
  • LoneWolf15 - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link

    Looks like there's no HDCP support or HDMI connector added like I'd expect with a brand new top-end card. And, they didn't add the new quieter cooler to the X1900XT. Pity. I doubt it would cost ATI more, and it'd up the sale of cards since people hate the noisy fan ATI has been currently using.

    I'll pass. My older (by alpha-geek standards) X800XL does the job fine.

    P.S. -1 for not doing any bench tests with Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.
  • DerekWilson - Saturday, August 26, 2006 - link

    also, all of these cards have HDCP support -- which I believe I mentioned somewhere in there. HDMI is up to the vendor.
  • JarredWalton - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link

    +2 You might want to read page 8.
  • LoneWolf15 - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link

    I don't know what's going on, I must have been blind. My apologies there, Jarred.
  • Dfere - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link

    You just can't always eat your cake and then have it left over.

    YOu should change your phrase from "Sometimes we can have our cake and eat it too"

    to "Sometimes we can eat our cake and have it too"
  • poohbear - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link

    the established exnglish expression is "you cant have your cake and eat it too", even if it doesnt make logical sense. There are many words and expressions that dont make sense in english (driveway, football, highway). Im guessing you're not a native english speaker, but that's the way the language is. now, please post about technology and not the logic of english expressions.
  • Griswold - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link

    Whats wrong with football? Or do you mean american "football"?
  • poohbear - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link

    can anyone confirm if those power consumption tests are for the entire system or just the vid cards? the highest figure was 267wts: a high end system that consumes 267wts underload is sweet! can you confirm that is indeed for the entire system (cpu, mobo, hdd, vid card... everything). thanks.
  • JarredWalton - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link

    I'm pretty sure that this is power use for the entire system, but Derek's results are quite a bit lower than what I got on the ABS system I tested last week for X1900 CrossFire. Of course, the water cooling and extra fans on the ABS system might add a decent amount of power draw, and I don't know how "loaded" the systems are in this test. I would guess that Derek ran Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory for load conditions.

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