Monolith's F.E.A.R.: First Encounter Assault Recon is a highly anticipated first person shooter set to arrive this October.
The Halloween month release is likely not a coincidence as F.E.A.R. attempts to
blend elements of horror and the supernatural. The single player demo has been
available since early August and is the focus of the following benchmarks. Be
sure to check out this
excellent tweak
guide over at TweakGuides.com and watch it for updates when the full game
comes out.
This statement in the F.E.A.R. readme.txt file is what compelled me to make
this game a focus for this review:
In order to get the best game play experience, it is not
recommended to run F.E.A.R. at high resolutions. You should avoid
resolutions above 1024x768 on any current generation card.
This readme file was written on July 29, 2005 which means the NVIDIA 7800 GTX
clearly fits into their "any current generation card" statement. I don't know about
you, but that sounds like a challenge to me!
The settings I used are listed below. You'll notice that I cranked everything
up except for audio. I also did not enable Soft Shadows because they currently
only work if the in-game FSAA setting is enabled. I needed more control of the
antialiasing settings for my tests.
Vertical Sync: Off
Resolutions: 1024x768, 1280x960, and 1600x1200
Enable Hardware Mixing: Off
Enable EAX 2.0: Off
Enable EAX Advanced HD: n/a
Single Player Phsyics: Maximum
Max Hardware Sounds: Minimum
NVIDIA Control Panel controlled antialiasing: Off, 2xAA, and 4xAA
