NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB: Upping The Ante
F.E.A.R. v1.02
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;) F.E.A.R |
One of the most highly anticipated titles of 2005, Monolith's new paranormal thriller F.E.A.R promises to be as thrilling to the mind as it is to the eyes. 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 v1.02, we put the graphics cards in this review through their paces to see how they fared with a promising new 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). Benchmark runs were then completed at resolutions of 1280x960 and 1600x1200, with and without anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled. |
Before we discuss F.E.A.R. performance, we should note that there is a bug in ATI's Catalyst v5.11 drivers that hinders performance in this new title. And to remedy the problem, Catalyst A.I. was disabled in these tests...
F.E.A.R. is another game where ATI's Radeon X1800 XT compared very favorably to a 256MB GeForce 7800 GTX, besting NVIDIA's previous flagship card by a wide margin when anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were enabled. And in fact, the Radeon X1800 XT is still able to fend off the new 512MB GeForce 7800 GTX, albeit by smaller margins. Without any additional pixel processing enabled though, the Radeon X1800 XT's performance doesn't look so good, as it gets beaten by 20 FPS and 15 FPS depending on the resolution. F.E.A.R. also happens to be another game where SLI with a pair of 512MB GeForce 7800 GTX cards is able to break the key 60 frame per second barrier at 1600x1200, when anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering is enabled. Graphically intense games like F.E.A.R. are what SLI was made for.
