Sapphire Ultimate X1600 Pro and X1600 XT
F.E.A.R.
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;) 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 v1.02, 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 high values, but with soft shadows disabled (Soft shadows and anti-aliasing do not work together currently). Benchmark runs were then completed at resolutions of 1024x768 and 1280x1024 (by editing the cfg file), without anti-aliasing enabled or anisotropic filtering, and then with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering. |
The X1600 XT enjoys an 4FPS (average) lead over the 6600 GT here. Using AA and AF increases the lead to 9FPS, though an average framerate of 35FPS is a bit hard to game with. The Sapphire X1600 Pro is able to remain above 40FPS, and while it's not the smoothest ride, it is playable.
F.E.A.R. becomes a little difficult to play at a resolution of 1280x1024. You can forget about having a good time when AA and AF are used, as 24 FPS average is hard to enjoy.
