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F.E.A.R

Thankfully, games are now beginning the transition to shaders. One such games is F.E.A.R, which is still taxing even on the GeForce 7800GTX 256 MB with AA and AF enabled. So how does the number of quads, core and memory clocks influence performance in this game? Let's find out.


Looks like we still have some elbow room with F.E.A.R's performance test. Using different types of filtering or changing the number of samples have quite an effect on performance. We're pretty sure we're not system limited here. F.E.A.R is a shader heavy game, so it's interesting to see the performance difference between 4, 5 and 6 quads on the same core and memory clock. All the results do have the same tendency - lower frame rates as more complicated filtering and / or more samples are used.

A little interesting side note: looks like 2x AF and bilinear are not the same, as do 4x AF with trilinear, despite they both respectively use the same number of texture samples.

With 6 quads, anisotropic filtering penalty can range from 3 to 7 fps, while with 5 quads its around 10 fps. Strangely enough, 4 quads experienced less penalty than 5 quads, ranging from 6 to 8 fps. F.E.A.R benchmark results do fluctuate a bit, usually by 2 - 3 fps, so we think that the actual penalty is actually the same regardless of the number of quads. Overall, the performance difference per quad is around 5 fps from 5 to 6 quads and around 10 fps from 4 to 5 quads. Just look at bilinear, 8x and 16x AF results. Once AA is put into the mix, the picture does change slightly - frame rates with 5 and 6 quads are identical, while 4 quads lag slightly behind. How is that possible? Let's see those numbers in a table to see them more clearly.

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