Fall '06 NVIDIA GPU Refresh - Part II: GeForce 7950 GT and SLI

F.E.A.R. Performance

F.E.A.R. has a built in test that we make use of in this performance analysis. This test flies through some action as people shoot each other and things blow up. F.E.A.R. is very heavy on the graphics, and we enable most of the high end settings for our test.

During our testing of F.E.A.R., we noted that the "soft shadows" don't really look soft. They jumped out at us as multiple transparent shadows layered on top of each other and jittered to appear soft. Unfortunately, this costs a lot in performance and not nearly enough shadows are used to make this look realistic. Thus, we disable soft shadows in our test even though it's one of the large performance drains on the system.

Again we tested with anisotropic filtering at 8x, and all options were on their highest quality (with the exception of soft shadows which was disabled). Frame rates for F.E.A.R. can get pretty low for a first person shooter, but the game does a good job of staying playable down to about 25 fps.



All the cards we tested are playable at 1600x1200 under the settings we tested with F.E.A.R. In this case, the 7950 GT performs significantly better than the $200-$250 cards, but the X1900 XT series both have NVIDIA beat at the higher price point. While not necessary at this resolution, multi-GPU configurations scale very well under F.E.A.R.



When looking at multiple resolutions, nothing really changes. Relative performance is very consistent with 1600x1200. Everything remains playable up to 1920x1440, so with most of the tested GPUs enabling 2x/4xAA is definitely an option even at the highest resolutions. The three slowest cards will really struggle with 4xAA at 1920x1440, but the higher end cards along with the multi-GPU configurations should handle that setting.