F.E.A.R. Performance

F.E.A.R. (or First Encounter Assault Recon) is a one of the newer entrants to our game benchmark suite, and it features jaw-dropping graphics, a killer Matrix-like "reflex time" feature, and a physics engine that can bring any system to its knees. This Monolith production includes a wide selection of System and Video settings, along with an in-game testing module to keep things 100% comparable between different graphics cards. In this case, as we are dealing with video card performance, so we have racked the computer and graphics settings to high (max only increases AF and AA) and then testing at the different resolutions.

F.E.A.R. is one of the most demanding game benchmarks in our entire suite, and its overall design rewards both pure graphics performance and an SM 2.0/3.0 feature set. The Albatron GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB again posts extremely good scores in this test, outpacing both the Radeon X1950 Pro and GeForce 7900 GT cards. These are very impressive scores, and F.E.A.R. is certainly no creampuff benchmark even at standard resolutions and details.

F.E.A.R. AA and AF Widescreen Performance

The move to 4X AA and 8X AF detail settings drops all the mainstream cards back quite a bit, and you can really see where the extra detail and higher resolution puts a strain on the mid-range video cards, especially in the area of memory bandwidth.

Company of Heroes Performance

Company of Heroes is yet another new addition to our game benchmark suite, and as a newly-released product, it offers one of the most demanding benchmark environments ever. CoH is a WW2 real-time strategy game, which again provides us with a nice change of pace from the usual FPS benchmark. To give the video cards an even tougher time, we have enabled SM3.0, and set every available graphics option to High.

Company of Heroes is another very demanding part of our game benchmarking suite, and one that the ATI Radeon cards seem very adept at running. The scores bear this out, as we see the Albatron GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB falling back of the Radeon X1950 Pro, while the powerful GeForce 7950 GT 512MB is beaten by the Radeon X1950 Pro 256MB.

Company of Heroes AA and AF Widescreen Performance

The higher resolution widescreen results are even worse for the NVIDIA contingent, and all the GeForce-based cards take a huge hit at these settings.