Quaere Verum

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 t...

In the process of burning in and testing my PC's new components (see earlier post here ), I ran a number of benchmarks to give me an idea of it's relative performance, particularly when running 3D games. Here are the results I got. If you're into this type of thing, perhaps you could run the benchmarks yourself and compare your results. :-) Futuremark benchmarks: 3DMark 2001 SE : 15,212 3DMarks 3DMark03 : 4,891 3DMarks 3DMark05 : 2,245 3DMarks 3DMark06 : 779 3DMarks Note: All 3DMark tests were run using default settings. Download free versions of the benchmarks above by clicking on their respective links. Doom 3 benchmarks: High Quality, 800x600: 72.9 FPS High Quality, 1,024x768: 72.9 FPS Hiqh Quality, 1,280x1,024: 60.6 FPS Note: Testing done using Doom 3's built-in "demo1". You can do this yourself by bringing down the console and entering the command: "timedemo demo1". If you don't know how to access the console read this guide . Read my revi...