F.E.A.R. Single Player Demo Performance
Monolith's scary game title brings brown-trousers atmosphere to the table with judicious use of post processing effects and a nice lighting and shadowing model. It's one of the current titles or demos that really brings modern hardware down a peg or two. There's no scope for HDR lighting in F.E.A.R., although whispers abound for something to that effect in due course. HEXUS use Beepa's seriously excellent FRAPS to benchmark a run through a 2 minute section of the game featuring two shootouts that both use the slow-mo feature. Throwing a grenade, using slow-mo and then shooting it to explode it in mid air just plain rocks.
At 1600x1200, F.E.A.R. is nearly twice as fast on X1800 XT than GeForce 7800 GTX is, without any of the usual IQ enhancing options enabled in the game.
If I was Velma Dinkley, I might shout, "Jinkies!". But I'm not, so I won't. Instead, I repeatedly reran the runthrough multiple times to check its validity, on both sets of hardware. The reasons for F.E.A.R. doing so well on the new ATI hardware are likely shader efficiency and framebuffer space related, the 512MiB memory size on ATI's hardware allowing it to do very well.
