Thoughts on F.E.A.R. Settings

[ilovesocks]

I just tried the F.E.A.R. demo a little, and I was able to tweak my settings to get very nice framerates (couldn't tell you exactly what they were, but very playable) even though my rig is an outdated budget one that I finished a few months ago.

I was able to max out all settings with 2x FSAA and 4x anisotropic texture filtering if I disabled volumetric lighting and turned down the shadow details and used 800x600 resolution. In the process, I realized that my 5400-rpm Seagate U-series hard drive is a big bottleneck. It would freeze quite often while waiting for the hard drive to load stuff, but then would be smooth as butter right after. And it looked amazing! The smoke, sparks, and chunks taken out of the wall by my shotgun were a very nice touch. Luckily I've got a Raptor coming on Tuesday!

So I think it's safe to say that F.E.A.R. can be run quite nicely even on mid-low-end rigs like mine if you disable the right things. Of course, that was just the demo; perhaps the actual game has scenarios that are more taxing, like more enemies at the same time or something.

 

[Mr. Switch]

actually for me, the full game runs much smoother than the demo. it doesn't hitch every time i walk up a ladder or open a door, unlike the demo.

 

[woot7800GT]

Runs great for me on full everything (except soft shadows!!!)

 

[Vybuni]

The Demo runs with everything maxed out, at 1280x960x32 resolution with soft shadows and i get a decent framerate of like 30-60.

 

[Mr_Threepwood]

Switch can i ask you come questions, is the card you have is AGP right? And why use windows 2000 over xp, is it because of the resources xp uses?

 

[Mr. Switch]

Switch can i ask you come questions, is the card you have is AGP right? And why use windows 2000 over xp, is it because of the resources xp uses?

Yeah, my 6800GT is AGP. You were probably confused because whenever 'LanParty' is mentioned here, its usually one of DFI's nForce 4 SLI boards and they are PCI-Express. My LanParty uses the nForce3 chipset which is AGP.

As for win2k, Just a few weeks ago i made the switch to XP Pro. I was using 2000 before for 2 main reasons: Cost (XP Pro is almost $200) i got a special deal from a friend who owns a buisness and bought too many copies of XP so I bought it for $45. And I didn't think that it was really worth the switch untill i got fed up with reformatting in 2000. with XP, system resote would of fixed my problems everytime without reformatting.