The recently released F.E.A.R. contains some of the most demanding graphics currently available. Visit forums and you’ll no doubt find people thoroughly depressed over how low they have to set the detail levels to get the game up and running at a respectable pace with their hardware. The GOLD code certainly performs better than the demo did however you still really do need a high end system to get the best out of this title ...

In this, the first test of our review the two cards on test are pretty evenly matched at the first two settings. Certainly the 6800GS just pulls ahead, however not by much. When we move up to 1280x960 with 2aa and 8af though the 6800GS takes a commanding lead over the X1600XT.

We’ve got all ingame settings other than soft shadows set to maximum for our tests…you’d need a bit of tinkering with the detail settings to get either card running above 25fps at all times but its clear that this is more likely to be achievable on the GS with higher settings when compared to the ATI counterpart.

UPDATE:

It was brought to our attention today over at Beyond3d that renaming FEAR.exe to pretty much anything else results in a performance increase on ATI hardware. (Thanks to PC Format for initially finding the bug). We tested this out and there doesn’t seem to be any IQ loss in FEAR with the renamed EXE. Therefore we’ve re-run the 1280 2aa 8af test shown above and here are the revised results.

Dont have flash installed? then click here for a jpeg

As you can see this is one of the few games where the X1600XT actually outscores the 6800GS on average framerate. What a great bugfix! (which should make it into Catalyst 5.12)