Quality or Quantity: Both, Please!

We decided to lower quality settings of entry-level graphics cards to “medium”, then decided to disable volumetric lighting and enable “minimum” amount of DirectX 9 effects. Needless to say that performance increased pretty significantly: we could achieve 128 fps on an entry-level graphics card, however, the quality became much and much lower too.

Obviously, many gamers are likely to degrade image quality in favour of performance, as the game is just too demanding to run fast on graphics boards that cost $200 and below. While everyone decides for himself or herself, we would strongly recommend upgrading to a higher-performance graphics adapter rather than to lower image quality in favour of performance.

F.E.A.R. Extraction Point Quality Comparison
Maximum Quality	Medium Quality	Minimum Quality

As you see from the screenshots here, F.E.A.R. Extraction Point loses all its visual appeal on the “medium” quality settings already, not talking about “minimum” amount of effect and graphics details.