More benchmarks....

If there's a game which can surely bring all but the most powerful PCs down to their knees, it has to be F.E.A.R. (see my review of this game in this earlier post).

Like Doom 3, F.E.A.R. also has a benchmarking function built inside the game itself. All you have to do is go to the options menu, then click on performance, then test settings. That's all there is to it.

Here are the results I got on my PC:



Using medium computer and graphics settings as automatically set by the game, as determined by my hardware setup (no tweaking whatsoever):

800x600: minimum 21, maximum 76, average 35 FPS
1,024x768: minimum 13, maximum 54, average 23 FPS
1,280X960: minimum 9, maximum 34, average 16 FPS

Clearly, you have to have some serious muscle in your rig if you want to run this game at high quality and at high resolutions. Even with my current setup, I'm getting an average of only 23 FPS at 1,024x768. If your current PC's specifications are less than stellar, you may have to turn the settings down to get some playable framerates.

This game is also apparently a memory hog. My older Athlon XP 2400+ with 1.5 GB of RAM seems to be getting better numbers than my current Athlon 64 3000+ with 1 GB of RAM using the same video card.

If you want the best gaming experience, you may want to consider having a gig of RAM as a minimum, along with a 3 GHz class processor and a 256 MB video card, along with some judicious tweaking of the graphics settings. The bare minimum requirements as stated in the box (1.7 GHz class processor, 64 MB video card and 512 MB RAM) simply won't cut it, unless you turn most of the settings down and run the game at lower resolutions. But if you do, you'll be missing out on a lot.

That's about it for the benchmarks. I'm off to something new.

Test setup:

MSI K8N Neo v2.0, Athlon 64 3000+ @ 2.1 GHz (Socket 754 version), 256 MB Inno3D GeForce 6800LE @ 375/1,000 MHz (core/memory), 2 x PQI 512 MB DDR 400 DIMM, Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2, ForceWare v84.21, nForce3 v5.11, F.E.A.R. 1.0.

Related Posts:

Benchmarks....