FEAR(2005) – retro – PC performance graphics benchmarks of Graphics Cards

BASIC GAME INFORMATION

 

Year of construction: 2005
Genre: Action (Shooter), 3D, 1st Person
developer: Monolith Productions
Publishing house: Soft Club 

 

The police are catching the criminals. Special forces neutralize terrorists. The army is ready to repel the attack of another army. With their help, the government is able to destroy any enemy of flesh and blood. But there are opponents that conventional military forces cannot cope with. When something truly unusual happens, when a murder could only be the work of ghosts, when another world rebels against the human world, FEAR – the Federal Active Response Unit – comes into play. 

This story begins as an action movie, in which a secret military facility ends up in the hands of unknown terrorists. They take hostages but make no demands. The government deploys special forces, but contact with the unit is lost shortly after the operation begins. And a few moments later, internal surveillance cameras show a picture of the carnage – the bodies of soldiers being torn apart by an unknown force before they have time to understand what is happening… 

THE GRAFICAL PART

This subsection of our review highlights the main graphical aspects of this game. Particular attention is paid to the version of the graphics engine used, the version of the API used, graphic settings and the quality of development of the main visual aspects.

Supported OS and graphics API

FEAR only works under Windows ME, Windows XP and Windows Vista/7/8. Other operating systems are not currently supported and are unlikely to receive support.

 

The priority and main graphics API for the multiplayer game FEAR is DirectX 9. The game also supports DirectX 8.1. The game was developed with the support of NVIDIA.

Game engine

 Using the Lithtech Jupiter Extended engine, the 2005 game FEAR was developed, noted by reviewers as having one of the most advanced (at the time of the game’s release) artificial intelligence system.

In this version, image rendering is carried out using DirectX 9. High-resolution textures, various methods of relief texturing, and pixel shaders version 3.0 are supported. Many post-processing effects have been added, including: blur, motion blur, depth of field, etc. Third-party Havok technology is used as a physics engine.

Due to the specific work with some functions, the engine at the time of its release was quite demanding on the resources of the user’s computer. This mainly concerned working with soft dynamic shadows: to draw a soft shadow, the engine mixes several identical shadows with sharp edges at once, applying a blur effect to each of them.

For the computer game FEAR, the FEAR Public Tools SDK was released, which includes a level editor that allows players to create locations for the game. 

Advanced Game Settings

By the standards of 2005, FEAR had an incredible number of graphic settings, items and sub-items, in general so many that it was easy for the average user to get confused in this stunning variety. 

 

Below we have provided screenshots of the game at various graphics settings, where our readers can see the difference between the minimum, medium and maximum graphics quality settings.  

Low quality settings

Medium quality settings

Very high settings

As we can see, with different quality settings, the graphics change quite significantly – from the level of 2001 and even fit the standards of 2007…

Comparison of anti-aliasing modes

Anti-aliasing in the game is very difficult to notice, but in terms of performance (for video cards of 2005), its activation has a significant impact.

Comparison of 1280×1024 and FullHD

Even at that time, the game fully supported FullHD – the viewing angle becomes much wider. The prospect of moving from the 4×3 standard to 16×9 was obvious.

General visual design and game physics

Well, what can I say, at the time of its release, FEAR not only graphically surprised, but also stumped many owners of gaming hardware. No wonder, because the majority of users at that time had video cards of the Radeon 9xxx or GeForce FX level in their arsenal, so in most cases the release of this game pushed for an unscheduled upgrade…

 

Let’s return to the graphics, FEAR, first of all, had incredible physics, it had partial destructibility of most objects, which at that time was simply an incredible sight. It is also worth noting the implementation of the flame – before this fire has never looked so realistic. The implementation of the water surface was also worth all the praise. 

  

Next, we will move directly to gaming tests and determine what impact this game had on computer hardware of that time.  

TEST PART

GPU test

All video cards were tested at maximum graphics quality using MSI Afterburner. The purpose of the test is to determine how video cards from different manufacturers behave under the same conditions. The average and minimum FPS were taken as performance indicators. Below is a video of the gaming benchmark:

Our video cards were tested at different screen sizes 1024×768, 1280×1024 and 1920×1080 at maximum graphics quality settings allowed by FEAR. 

Testing at resolution 1024×768

 

Testing at maximum quality settings 1024×768

 

With these settings an acceptable FPS indicator was shown by video cards of the Radeon X1300XT or GeForce 6800 XT level. The optimal video cards will be solutions Radeon X1800XT or GeForce 7600 GT and above.   

Testing at resolution 1280×1024

  

Testing at maximum quality settings 1280×1024

 

With these settings An acceptable FPS indicator was shown by video cards of the Radeon X1800 XT or GeForce 7600 GS level. The optimal video cards will be solutions Radeon X1900XT or GeForce 7900 GS and above.   

Testing at resolution 1920×1080

  

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920×1080 

 

With these settings an acceptable FPS indicator was shown by video cards of the Radeon X1800XT or GeForce 7800GT level. 

VRAM test

Testing of video memory consumed by the game was carried out by the program MSI Afterburner. The indicator was based on results on top video cards from AMD and NVIDIA with separate screen sizes 1024×768  и 1280×1024 with different antialiasing settings.

Testing at maximum memory GPU quality settings 

 

The recommended amount of video memory usage for a resolution of 1024×768 will be 200 MB of video memory, for a resolution of 1280×1024 – about 218 MB of video memory and for a resolution of 1920×1080 about 253 MB of video memory.  

Micro-Stuttering Test

Introducing our testing of FPS output latency on a Micro-Stuttering monitor. The indicator was based on the results on video cards from ATi X1950 Pro and NVIDIA GeForce 7950GT at a resolution of 1024×768 with maximum image quality settings.

Testing at maximum quality settings Micro-Stuttering GPU

 

Micro-Stuttering latency performance is within acceptable limits on solutions from both manufacturers.

RAM test

 

The test was carried out on the basic configuration of Phenom II X4 [email protected] GHz with 2GB DDR2 800 MGz pre-installed memory. The entire RAM used by the game was taken as an indicator. The RAM test on the entire system was carried out on various test benches without launching third-party applications (browsers, etc.).

Testing the game’s RAM consumption at various quality settings 

 

As we can see, with various quality settings, the amount of RAM consumed in FEAR is at the level of 500-900 megabytes.  

 

We share your opinions and impressions about our new testing section. Let’s immediately clarify a few points – there will be no testing of processors of that era, firstly, this is not the main profile of our resource, and secondly, with working platforms of that time it is even worse than with video cards. No matter how hard we tried, we could not get top solutions of that level with 512 MB of video memory, if you can help us get them, we will be very grateful.

Also, many users may have a question, why is this all, because neither the games nor the video cards of that time are no longer relevant to modern gamers. We will answer – this is the history of PC gaming, and while we have the opportunity, we would like to preserve it in a modern interpretation while we have such an opportunity.