4xAA/8xAF Performance Tests

This is a good option for gamers with a high end card. Generally, the best way to get a better experience from a game is going to be increasing resolution. This is especially true of FEAR because the performance hit of enabling 4xAA is incredibly large. Much of FEAR is designed well to avoid noticeable aliasing (low contrast edges), and the most noticeable edges in the game are high contrast shadows.

When we enable 4xAA and 8xAF, the higher resolutions take an even bigger performance hit than with soft shadows (as we will see soon). At 1600x1200, the framerates of the 7800 GTX and GT are cut in half, making the game less enjoyable to play. At 1280x960, the 7800 GTX gets 39 fps, and the 7800 GT gets 33 fps; both of these are playable. The X1800 XL gets 32 fps at this resolution, which would also be playable. At lower resolutions, the cards didn't take as big of a performance hit with AA as with soft shadows enabled. You can see that all of these cards are playable at 800x600 except for the X1300 PRO, which is borderline at 640x480 with AA. Let's also make it clear that we stopped testing performance at higher resolutions when framerates dropped below 20 fps. Performance that bad or worse is simply useless.

No Soft Shadows and No AA/AF Performance Tests Soft Shadows Performance
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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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