X-bit labs

ATI RADEON X800 XL 512MB Graphics Card Review. 512MB: Today’s Need or Reserve for the Future? (page 15)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

[ 05/05/2005 | 02:10 PM ]

F.E.A.R. Multiplayer Beta

F.E.A.R. is a completely new game now under development at Sierra Entertainment. We use its beta version in our tests that is limited to the multiplayer mode. Yet even the beta version of the game is highly impressive. It raises the graphics quality bar at a whole new level. This shooter is definitely more beautiful than Far Cry or Half-Life 2. The game has an integrated benchmark which is, however, not very accurate. The benchmarked scene is not always reproduced correctly: sometimes the soldiers refuse to enter the mined room thus strongly affecting the final result. We also warn you against taking the numbers below too seriously: practice suggests that game developers often optimize the final versions of games for the available hardware, and the GPU manufacturers are optimizing the drivers, too.

A number of sophisticated special effects, including realistic water, soft shadows and reflections, make this game – based on a new engine from Monolith – a highly demanding application. We could only squeeze 48fps out of the GeForce 6800 Ultra at the maximum graphics quality settings. The cards of the RADEON X800 and X850 families have worse results probably because the game makes use of the special features of the NV4x architecture, particularly UltraShadow II technology.

With 4x FSAA and aniso-filtering enabled, the RADEON X800 XL 512MB is a little ahead of the RADEON X800 XL 256MB. That’s natural, considering the quality of the image. The gap is about 10%. Given the highest hardware requirements of F.E.A.R., there’s no talking about playability of the “eye candy” mode. You can get 20-25fps at best with a modern graphics card, and not a single frame more. Are we to wait for the next generation of graphics cards to play this game?

The new RADEON X800 XL again shows how important the amount of graphics memory is for upcoming games. Despite the relatively low frequencies, it delivers the performance of the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition and is even faster than this top-end model in 1024x768, even though by 1fps only. Like in the 4x FSAA mode, none of the graphics cards was capable of yielding 20fps even, so the full-screen antialiasing feature is practically useless in F.E.A.R., at least with the current version engine and on the currently available hardware.