by Anton Shilov , Yaroslav Lyssenko
10/18/2006 | 09:28 PM
Those, who have come a long way from dark and monotonous rooms of Prince of Persia and Zeliard of the early nineties down to the shiny beaches of Far Cry, hardly can be impressed with anything like Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. Moreover, it is hardly likely that they would be scared from street clashes of the Half-Life 2 or impressed by the realism of similar clashes of Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter not because the games lack something, but because they are not tailored to being realistic due to technical or other reasons. But there is an amazing way to add realism and immersion without adding too many details – like shot off body parts of Soldier of Fortune – to catch the imagination of the gamer and make him scare himself.
<%BANNER[article]%>You don’t need to cry if you want to be heard. You do not need to demonstrate what is about to happen next to show off what will happen next; all you have to do is to make the viewer imagine the trace of what is going to occur. This could be done by showing off the start and the bloody finish, predeceased by scary sounds and followed by the absolute silence. Well, that’s what the director of The Ring motion picture, as well as producers of F.E.A.R. and Condemned: Criminal Origins video games have managed to do very well: to create frightening psychological thrillers that are more or less politically correct.
The new F.E.A.R. Extraction Point continues the traditions of the original F.E.A.R. and adds a few new graphics effects, which are, apparently, pretty much performance demanding. This article will briefly explain the differences between the good old F.E.A.R. and its improved version as well as reveal the requirements of the game when it comes to graphics hardware.
Just like in case of the original F.E.A.R., Vivendi Universal Games released a demo that includes venues from different levels of the forthcoming game. Other makers typically comprise a couple of the first levels of a game to make up the game’s demo version, but Vivendi creates a mix of different locations for the demo for some reason. That said, we are unable to share the plot of the game as well as our feelings about the gameplay, except a few thoughts.
From the game’s name it is obvious that now our character has to fight evil forces lead by small girl called Alma somewhere from where they come from. Therefore, we can expect some new locations and, perhaps, methods of fight. F.E.A.R. Extraction Point begins where the original game ends: right after the nuclear explosion of the city and after Alma’s re-emergence.
We do not know what happens next, as the actual game begins in a yet another warehouse, where we have to fight soldiers, invisible puppets and a robot. We still have slow-motion capability, which really “helps to control challenging situations”, but this time we also have some new weapons, which seems interesting. Unfortunately, the demo shows office spaces, warehouses and corridors, something we know from the original F.E.A.R. as pretty boring locations. In addition to that, we seem to have need to travel around subway tunnels, also a not really exciting place.
The new game still uses Jupiter EX graphics engine and Havok physics engine without any significant modifications, like usage of certain cinematic effects in Condemned: Criminal Origins. Nevertheless, the demo of F.E.A.R. Extraction Point uses more effects than the original game did and we would the final title to be more intensive than F.E.A.R. from special effects point of view.
Generally speaking, F.E.A.R. Extraction Point experience should be the same as of the original one. The differences seem to be negligible: new weapons, new locations, a little bit enlarge levels, a little bit more graphics effects. That said, we would suggest that gamers should have a little more powerful computer systems to play the expansion pack compared to the original game.
Let us now take a look at the actual performance numbers!
We compared different graphics cards on platforms configured as follows:
The drivers were set up in such a way as to provide a comparable, yet highest possible texture filtering quality.
ATI Catalyst:
Nvidia ForceWare:
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.
Monolith’s F.E.A.R. is one of a few games where Nvidia’s GeForce 7950 quad SLI graphics sub-system is able to demonstrate its strong points. Being a part of “The Way It’s Meant to Be Played” program by Nvidia, F.E.A.R. Extraction Point also demonstrates advantages of four graphics chips. Unfortunately, in 1280x960 resolution quad SLI turns on “compatibility” mode where only one chip out of four is operating.
Even though all the premium graphics cards more or less allow playing comfortably, Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2 is significantly faster that the Radeon X1950 XTX, whereas ATI’s Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire has no chances against Nvidia’s GeForce 7950 quad SLI.
For some reason, ATI’s CrossFire technology does not demonstrate really high performance scalability in F.E.A.R. Extraction Point with FSAA 4x and AF 16x enabled. Only the GeForce 7950 quad SLI allows to play F.E.A.R. Extraction Point in 1600x1200 resolution with all the eye candy set to maximum.
Although the Radeon X1950 XTX is slightly faster than the GeForce 7950 GX2, their performance is too low to be useful for gaming.
Single-GPU high-end configurations offer comparable performance and hardly allow to play the game with comfortable speed in 1600x1200 resolution, whereas among dual-GPU setups Nvidia’s GeForce 7900 GTX SLI has significantly higher performance compared to the Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire.
ATI’s Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire tandem does not allow to enjoy smooth frame rate in F.E.A.R. Extraction Point with FSAA 4x and anisotropic filtering 16x activated, whereas GeForce 7900 GTX SLI offers nearly 60 fps even in 1600x1200 resolution.
Single-GPU high-end configurations offer similar performance, hence, users looking at them should consider the fact that ATI’s Radeon X1900 XTX has higher-quality anisotropic filtering as well as lower price compared to the GeForce 7900 GTX. Still, without tweaking of graphics settings neither of the single-GPU configurations will provide smooth gameplay.
Since price-point of the Radeon X1900 XT has been rapidly in the past few months, we decided to include it into the performance-mainstream set of graphics cards.
As we see, only the Radeon X1900 XT can deliver nearly 60 fps in 1280x960, but can hardly provide comfortable F.E.A.R. Extraction Point gaming in 1600x1200 resolution. ATI Radeon X1900 GT offers similar performance to the GeForce 7900 GT, but both are pretty slow with all the effects activated.
F.E.A.R., even a year after the release, remains a tremendously performance hungry game, which is why no mainstream graphics cards can satisfy its demands with all the effects enabled. Talking about price:performance ratio, we believe it is obvious that ATI’s Radeon X1950 Pro is much better than the rest boards here.
For lower-end graphics cards F.E.A.R. Extraction Point with all the effects on is an unrealizable task. We would suggest gamers to lower the quality settings to “medium” in order to get reasonable amount of frames per second.
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 | ||
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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.
F.E.A.R. Extraction Point is about to be launched. The title seems to be very similar to its predecessor and it is pretty unclear whether the game will really be an exciting one: the original F.E.A.R. definitely turned out to be frightening, but pretty boring. The demo does not show much variability in locations and this is not a good sign.
Graphics-wise and audio-wise, F.E.A.R. Extraction Point is an amazing game: ambient music, scary sounds and realistic visuals make this title a very appealing. But in order to play the game with maximum amount of special effects, you need to have a truly high-performance personal computer, as mainstream and performance-mainstream graphics processors and microprocessors will hardly enable users to play F.E.A.R. Extraction Point with the highest eye candy.
During our testing we experienced noticeable swapping on a system with 1GB of memory with “force restart” option enabled. Computers with 2GB of random access memory worked much better, even though we would not call it rapid operation. We would strongly recommend you to use 2GB of memory and a high-performance central processing unit for smooth performance of F.E.A.R. Extraction Point.
Obviously, F.E.A.R. Extraction Point is tremendously hungry for graphics card’s performance and we the better one you use, the more pleasurable experience you will have. Based on the numbers we have obtained today, among comparable graphics cards based on visual processing units from ATI Technologies and Nvidia, the GeForce boards would deliver higher performance. The exceptions are the Radeon X1950 Pro and the Radeon X1900 XT, which either beat, or come in line with the rivals – the models 7900 GS and 7950 GT.
As far as our present testing found out, the best options for F.E.A.R. Extraction Point are Nvidia GeForce 7950 quad SLI and Nvidia GeForce 7900 GTX SLI which deliver blazing speeds at the highest quality settings. Even though ATI’s Radeon X1950-series offerings also deliver nice performance, they cannot match the competitors today.