Falcon Northwest FragBox SLI: Dare to Dream

F.E.A.R. v1.03

Whereas many of the other games become largely CPU limited with systems this powerful, FEAR is a game that can pretty much take as much GPU power as you can afford to throw at it. Performance shows a steady downward trend with increasing resolution, even on 7900 GTX SLI configurations. Enabling 4xAA (or soft shadows if you think those look better) only accelerates the trend. If the FEAR engine is a sign of things to come, more than a few people are going to need to upgrade their PCs over the coming year. Thankfully, for the time being it appears to be the exception rather than the rule - though Oblivion now seems to lead in terms of overall system requirements.

Incidentally, FEAR v1.04 was released while I was performing benchmarks. I did install that and run a few test benchmarks on one of the systems, and found that the new version performed essentially the same as the older version. I also performed some quick testing with sound enabled, and found that the game is so GPU limited that the impact of turning on sound is less than 3% in almost all cases -- not enough to worry about, in other words. Also, I did run a few benchmarks with soft shadows enabled. Performance was far worse than with anti-aliasing, and was generally unplayable. ATI's X1900 CrossFire setup apparently does better, but basically the soft shadows are more of a check mark than something most people can currently use and still get playable frame rates.









Given that FEAR is so GPU limited, it's not too surprising to see most of the systems performing all but identically. The DFI results are missing for the 7900 GT, due to the motherboard failure mentioned earlier. As for the GTX results, I was about ready to retest them when the motherboard gave up the ghost. As you can see, the scores are clearly better than a single GTX, but they're nowhere near as fast as the FragBox. I have a feeling that something was misconfigured in the NVIDIA drivers, but I was unable to verify this.

That does bring up something worth mentioning: don't expect every game to work immediately with SLI, even the ones that are supposed to be SLI-ready. Patches to games can sometimes cause issues, and often times you will be forced to use a tool such as nHancer in order to create an SLI profile that works. Most likely, the DFI system was running in a sub optimal SLI mode, so I left the numbers in to illustrate a point. Plan on doing a bit of extra legwork now and then in order to get games running properly with SLI.