Benchmarking Your GPU with F.E.A.R.

ThinSkin writes "Monolith's new shooter F.E.A.R. is all fun and games, but it can also be used as a benchmark to test your GPU's performance. ExtremeTech's Jason Cross goes into detail on benchmarking your GPU with this graphically-intensive game. In addition, the article also tests the performance of high- and mid-range cards from ATI and Nvidia to see which scores top marks." It's a tough game; I had to buy a new rig.

Comments

mid range system

[rwven]

I found that if you have a midrange system you can turn everything to max, but keep volumetric lighting and all shadows turned off and the framerate stays pretty constant no matter what other settings are enabled or at what quality. The only thing i saw other than that, that hit my performance significantly was enabling full quality textures because i don't currently have enough ram ("only" a gig) to keep all the textures in. The HD swapped a TON with textures all the way up.

The in-game 'benchmark' is misleading

[Might E. Mouse]

The in-game 'benchmark' is misleading - it's just a fly-by, with no A.I. load on your CPU at all. Given how much amazing A.I. there is in F.E.A.R, the numbers you get from the in-game fly-by are not at all representative of real gameplay performance. In fact, they are artificially inflated. If you want to see the difference between non-playable fly-by runs and *real* human gameplay experience, I suggest you read bit-tech's review of F.E.A.R. They proved this benchmark was bollocks three weeks ago, so used FRAPS to measure someone physically playing the game. The results are way different. Unfortunately, the Anandtech benchmark review failed to spot this, so those figures are all wrong too

how to increase your FPS for free (ati)

[row1]

If you have an ati card (R4XX models) you can get a performance boots by renaming FEAR.exe to anything.exe.
Running fear 1.02 on an msi x800 xl
first i ran with FEAR.exe:
1st run (fps):
* min 25
* avg 46
* max 93
* 0% below 25
* 44% between 25 and 40
* 56% above 40
2nd run (fps):
* min 26
* avg 46
* max 91
* 0% below 25
* 43% between 25 and 40
* 57% above 40
then i quit and ran anything.exe
1st run (fps):
* min 22
* avg 42
* max 103
* 1% below 25
* 44% between 25 and 40
* 55% above 40
2st run (fps):
* min 21
* avg 42
* max 111
* 3% below 25
* 37% between 25 and 40
* 60% above 40
not believing it i reverted back to fear.exe and it went back to the first lot of results.
I dont know whats going on, but the max framerate jumped up by 20 fps as well as the percent above 40fps. The min and avg values went down a little.