Asus EN7950GX2 - GeForce 7950 GX2

F.E.A.R. is another game engine that does take advantage of Quad SLI but we'd also encourage you to focus more on single 7950 GX2 scores here as well.

Performance Comparisons with F.E.A.R More Info: http://www.whatisfear.com/us/

F.E.A.R

One of the most highly anticipated titles of 2005 was Monolith's paranormal thriller F.E.A.R. Taking a look at the minimum system requirements, we see that you will need at least a 1.7GHz Pentium 4 with 512MB of system memory and a 64MB graphics card, that is a Radeon 9000 or GeForce4 Ti-class or better, to adequately run the game. Using the full retail release of the game patched to v1.03, we put the graphics cards in this review through their paces to see how they fared with a popular title. Here, all graphics settings within the game were set to the maximum values, but with soft shadows disabled (Soft shadows and anti-aliasing do not work together currently).

Here the EN7950GX2 even took the Radeon X1900 CrossFire setup to task, edging out a the dual slot setup by a small 3fps margin--impressive to say the least.  In terms of single card performance the Asus EN7950GX2 has a 38%+ performance lead over any card in this test.  For an average retail price of around $150 more though, it can be said that you get what you pay for with the GeForce 7950 GX2.  Both standard SLI and CrossFire setups were no match for Quad SLI 7950s at these settings.  A pair of 7950 GX2s is about 13% faster than a pair of GeForce 7900 GTX cards.  Still not quite the performance gain we were looking for but impressive none-the-less.

Once again we also fired up super high quality AA modes for each GPU base in the test, 8Xs AA for NVIDIA cards and 10X SAA for ATI cards, which again we feel is the level playing field option we could go with beyond 4X AA rendering.  Of course we have screen shots for you to pick through as well, so you can decide which looks better or if things are on par visually as well. 

ATI 10X SAA	ATI 10X SAA	ATI 10X SAA
NVIDIA 8Xs AA	NVIDIA 8Xs AA	NVIDIA 8Xs AA

It was a bit difficult getting screen-shots lined up perfectly in this fast moving test, so we took several frames for comparison.  These are actual screens from the performance test that is built into F.E.A.R.  Again, in our humble opinion it's a very close match-up, comparing NVIDIA's 8Xs sample AA versus ATI's 10X SAA. However, looking at the texture surfaces on the light fixture above in these shots, an object you would probably hardly notice during game play, there is a slight image quality advantage for NVIDIA, at least according to our eyesight. 

At these super high AA settings, at 1600X1200 resolution, even the Asus EN7950GX2 has problems handling the rendering workload in F.E.A.R.  Dropping in another GeForce 7950 GX2 card certainly helps matters but frankly the Radeon X1900 CrossFire setup is probably the most impressive turn-out in this test.  Regardless, the GeForce 7950 GX2 and Asus' version of the card, do remain playable for the most part.