Soft Shadows Performance

Please refer back to our earlier section on soft shadows to learn why (aside from abysmal performance) we recommend against enabling soft shadows. Upon selecting the option in FEAR to enable soft shadows, a dialog box will pop up to inform the gamer that soft shadows are a high end option, which will only run well on heavy hitting graphics hardware. It is very true that you need to high end hardware to run the game with soft shadows, but we just don't like the feature.

With Soft Shadows enabled, the game takes a very significant performance hit. You can see that the 7800 GTX and GT become borderline-unplayable at 1600x1200, while the rest of the cards' framerates drop off quite abruptly. The X800 GT is only really playable at the absolute lowest resolution, and the X1300 PRO isn't really playable at all. At 37 fps, the 6600 GT does very well at 800x600, and although this is a low resolution by other games' standards, FEAR is still impressive. While 640x480 leaves something to be desired, 800x600 doesn't do a bad job in a pinch. But in a case like the 6600 GT, it is especially desirable to disable soft shadows and go with a higher resolution.

4xAA/8xAF Performance Tests Final Words
Comments Locked

117 Comments

View All Comments

  • Le Québécois - Thursday, October 20, 2005 - link

    I usually don't trust gamespot for their Hardware testing but until Anandtech comes up with a more complete test you can find more information here http://hardware.gamespot.com/Story-ST-x-2661-x-x-x">Gamespot

    They are testing differente CPU speed, graphic settings and RAM sizes.
  • smaky - Thursday, October 20, 2005 - link

    You are correct. There is no excuse for not including the x850 pe. Judgin from Gamespot's review, the x850 did well. Come on guys, lets see numbers for the x850! I have one and am a ATI fanboi for the moment. LOL
  • photoguy99 - Thursday, October 20, 2005 - link

    >lets see numbers for the x850!

    I would complain to ATI they are the ones pushing the heck out of new products they don't even have for sale. It's only natural this makes people more interested in X1000 line.

  • peldor - Thursday, October 20, 2005 - link

    OK so the highest graphics settings on FEAR are completely unplayable at any decent resolution for most of us, much like the 'Ultra' quality settings in Doom3 when it came out.

    What about all the other settings? I suspect the 'highest' settings make little difference to the visuals, but seriously cut the framerate versus the 'high' setting.

    At least a couple of benchmarks and screenshots to compare the medium/high/highest settings would be nice.
  • poohbear - Thursday, October 20, 2005 - link

    why are u guys using nvidia beta drivers? should'nt u test w/ only official drivers?
  • DerekWilson - Thursday, October 20, 2005 - link

    I would think the complaint should be against the beta ATI drivers which are a press sample that is completely unavailable to the public in any form. At least people can download and install the 81.85 drivers from NVIDIA.

    In all honesty, we used unavailable FEAR enhanced drivers for ATI because NVIDIA simply performed better and we didn't want to see complaints about the 81.85 driver... But I guess you can't always get what you want. :-)
  • Le Québécois - Thursday, October 20, 2005 - link

    Anychance you could e-mail me those press sample driver for ATI? :P
  • Le Québécois - Thursday, October 20, 2005 - link

    Oups...you read my mind Derek.
  • DerekWilson - Thursday, October 20, 2005 - link

    I've an update -- the driver we used is available here:

    http://support.ati.com/ics/support/DLRedirect.asp?...">http://support.ati.com/ics/support/DLRe...b1854&am...

    and was listed as a fix for serious sam II. It's the 5.10a driver and was posted yesterday for public consumption.
  • Bingo13 - Thursday, October 20, 2005 - link

    The 81.85 drivers will be WHQL approved and on Nvidia's website later today.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now