F.E.A.R.
Was released just last month and as well as being
a first class FPS its also one of the most demanding
games on the market in terms of visuals.
Just before we began testing
our X1800XT there were two things that happened
which affected our ATI test results. The first was
the release on Friday of the Catalyst
5.11 drivers which improved
our FEAR results and secondly whilst surfing the
net we found a forum thread at Beyond3d which indicated
that if you rename "FEAR.exe" to pretty
much anything else you receive a performance boost.
Those findings were confirmed by ATI's Terry Makedon
and so we used the renaming in the results on
this page. If you dont fancy renaming your
exe you'll find a real fix in Catalyst 5.12 which
will be released next month.
There are certainly some
interesting results to be seen in our FEAR benchmark.
Starting at 1280x960 with 4xAA and 16xAF
we see that at this resolution the X1800XT
is a reasonable amount ahead of the 7800GTX
512mb in the average FPS. The minimum FPS is very
close between the two with the XT being slightly
lower and on at least one occasion the results drop
below 25fps which resulted in a slight stutter.
Moving to 1600x1200
we see the GTX take a significant lead
in the overall performance. Regardless of which
figure your looking at the GTX performs
better at this setting. When we
add AA and AF to the game though we again
see the X1800XT take the lead in
both average and minimum fps. Neither of the two
cards are playable at this setting however so it
is a moot point..
Therefore on both cards the
ideal settings to use are maximum ingame settings
with soft shadows off and a resolution of 1280x960.
