Testbed and Methods

We compared different graphics cards on platforms configured as follows:

• AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 CPU (2x2.60GHz, 2x1MB L2 cache)
• Abit AN8 32X mainboard (nForce4 SLI x16) for Nvidia GeForce cards
• Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe mainboard (ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200) for ATI’s Radeons
• OCZ PC-3200 Platinum EL DDR SDRAM (2x1GB, CL2-3-2-5)
• Maxtor MaXLine III 7B250S0 hard disk drive (Serial ATA-150, 16MB buffer)
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 sound card
• Enermax Liberty 620W power supply (ELT620AWT)
• Samsung SyncMaster 244T monitor (24”, 1920x1200@75Hz max display mode)
• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2, DirectX 9.0c
• ATI Catalyst 6.10
• Nvidia ForceWare 91.47

The drivers were set up in such a way as to provide a comparable, yet highest possible texture filtering quality.

ATI Catalyst:

• Catalyst A.I.: Standard
• Mipmap Detail Level: High Quality
• Wait for vertical refresh: Always off
• Adaptive antialiasing: Off
• Temporal antialiasing: Off
• High Quality AF: On
• Other settings: by default

Nvidia ForceWare:

• Texture Filtering: High Quality
• Vertical sync: Off
• Trilinear optimization: Off
• Anisotropic mip filter optimization: Off
• Anisotropic sample optimization: Off
• Gamma correct antialiasing: On
• Transparency antialiasing: Off
• Other settings: by default

We set the highest possible graphics quality in the game, activated “force restart” capability to optimize usage of video memory, but did not enable soft shadows option. Unfortunately, the new game does not include performance test, which is why we had to test F.E.A.R. Extraction Point manually using Fraps.