SimHQ.com - Land Combat Zone - Review: F.E.A.R.

Minimum Requirements: Windows XP, XP 64 and 2000 with latest service pack installed, DirectX 9.0C (on disc), Pentium 4 1.7 GHz (or equivalent processor), 512 MB RAM, 64 MB Geforce 4 Ti or Radeon 9000 video card, monitor that can display in 4:3 aspect ratio, 5 GB HDD and additional HDD space for swap file, DVD-ROM (or CD-ROM), 16-bit DirectX 9.0 compliant sound card with support for EAX 2.0, broadband or LAN connection for multiplayer games

Recommended: Pentium 4 3 GHz (or equivalent processor), 1 GB RAM, a 256 MB Radeon 9800 Pro or Geforce 6600 or supported DirectX 9.0 compliant video card with hardware T&L and pixel shader 2.0 support, Sound Blaster X-Fi series sound card

Supported Chipsets: NVIDIA Geforce 4 Ti series, Geforce FX 5900 series, 6600 series, 6800 series, 7800 series, ATI Radeon 9000 series, 9500 series, 9600 series, 9700 series, 9800 series, Radeon X600 series, X700 series, X800 series, X850 series.

My Computer: Pentium 4 3 GHz, Windows XP Home Edition SP2 (Swedish), 1 GB RAM, Asus Geforce 6600 GT (AGP) 128MB (Forceware 81.94), DVD-ROM/Writer (don’t remember the speed), Creative Sound Blaster Audigy Player (latest drivers), ADSL, 4 gig swap file and Creative MegaWorks THX 5.1 550 surround system.

I’ve read on various forums where people had frame rates drop, sometimes even people with a lot better system that I have, so to run the game with all the bells and whistles you need a strong system and latest drivers as I noticed performance gains quite fast with unofficial NVIDIA drivers. You can gain extra performance not to use EAX and/or HW mixing and I’ve read that if you own a Radeon card you should change the name on the FEAR.exe-file to something else and you can gain additional frames rates. Do a search on the internet and you should find information on this.

I run the game at 1280x960x32, with antistropic filtering at two, no FSAA and eight graphics option on maximum setting, two on medium setting with EAX 2.0, EAX Advanced HD and Hardware Mixing disabled. It’s playable with the EAX, EAX Advanced HD and HW Mixing but I get some stuttering. I’ve turned of a few options or set at medium setting as the game reports that I don’t’ have enough graphics memory if those are turned on at max, I got 128MB and to have these settings on maximum I’ll need at least 256MB of graphics memory. The demo which was released before the game was plagued with bad frame rates, the final game does demand a lot of power, but it’s not as bad as the demo in my mind. With all the reports on bad frame rates on the Internet, how did this game run on my rig? Good. The built in performance test (more games should have this option) gives you a pretty good idea how the game will perform. The test is a demo level and a camera moving around through various events such as explosions and gun fire. I was actually stunned first time I did the test because I believed I had to get a new computer to run it, and behold, it ran just great. Just click on the second image down below and you’ll see the performance report. The graphics are quite incredible, and would look even better if I had a better graphics card, more RAM and a much faster processor so I could enable FSAA and turn up antistropic filtering and all those other graphics options which I’m now forced to have at medium setting. But I think it still looks great.

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