F.E.A.R. stresses top-end GPUs with soft shadows, volumetric lighting, particle effects, and parallax mapping. The game is wrought with high resolution textures, both bump mapped and parallax mapped to give a realistic feel. The game is intense throughout. This is no doubt attributed to the realistic feel of the brick and mortar walls, graphically depicted along with the casting of your character's shadow as you pass by.

The in-game benchmark was selected to stress the Inno3D iChill 8600GTS XStriker3. Resolutions of 1024x768, 1280xx960, and 1600x1200 were used with settings of no AA/AF, no AA/16AF, 2xAA/16AF, and 4xAA/16AF. Each setting was run a minimum of three times and an average of the runs was recorded in the graphs below as the final result.

F.E.A.R - Results

F.E.A.R.'s in-game benchmark does stress graphic cards but not near as much as parts of the actual game. Frame drops of 27% as indicated above, going from 2xAA to 4xAA @ 1280x960 (or 1280x1024) resolution indicate the GTS is starved for memory bandwidth. While actual gameplay was fine at the 2x setting the 4x setting was not, with several intense scenes being 'choppy' or 'lagging.' The same applies when upping the resolution to 1600x1200, everything is fine until AA is applied and then it seems there is just not enough memory bandwidth. At 1024x768, 4xAA/16AF, gameplay was smooth but my preference overall was at 1280x960 or 1280x1024, 2xAA/16AF with in-game settings as indicated.

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