As many of you will be aware, F.E.A.R (or First Encounter Assault & Recon in short) involves a rather mysterious looking girl in a red dress, a man with an unappetizing taste for human flesh and some rather flashy action set pieces aka The Matrix. All of this is brought together by one of the best game engines around.

F.E.A.R. makes its cinematic pretensions clear from the start. As soon as the credits roll, and the music starts, you are treated to the full works. The camera pans across scores of troops locked 'n' loaded and ready to hunt you down, all seemingly linked to 'Paxton Fettel', a strange kind of guy with extraordinary psychic powers capable of controlling battalions of soldiers and a habit of feeding off any poor unfortunate innocents - presumably to aid his powers of concentration. It doesn’t end there, after a short briefing at F.E.A.R. HQ you are sent off to hunt down Fettel equipped with reflexes that are 'off the chart'. These reflexes are put to excellent use, with slow motion effects like that of Max Payne, or the before mentioned Matrix. But here, it is oooohhhh so much more satisfying thanks to the outstanding environmental effects. Sparks fly everywhere, as chunks of masonry are blasted from the walls and blood splatters from your latest victim. The physics are just great, with boxes sent flying, shelves tipped over, and objects hurtling towards your head. And the explosions, well, the explosions just have to be seen, and what's so great about this is you can witness it in all its glory in slow motion.

Let me confirm to you that based on this, F.E.A.R. will have you shaking on the edge of your seat, if not falling off it. The tension is brought to just the right level with key moments that will make your heart leap. Play the demo and you will see what I mean. The key to this, is the girl. Without revealing anything significant, lets just say that she could take on the whole of Mars for creepiness.

Image Quality setting:

• 4x Anti Aliasing
• 16x Anisotropic Filtering
• Soft Shadows Disabled

F.E.A.R. has a built in test which we used to measure performance, you should try it yourself, it's really fun to look and compare with our results. Yet F.E.A.R. after all this time still is a tough title for the graphics cards; especially when you configure it to maximum image quality. This game is heavily pixel shaded and shows some dark and creepy effects. 4xAA and 16xAF where applied here, and again the two competing cards are dead on with each other performance wise.

Now to keep the game sessions a bit organized and clean to look at, I took 4 processors and a GeForce GTX 280.

• GTX 280 + Core 2 Duo E8400 processor (light blue)
• GTX 280 + Core i7 920  processor (dark blue)
• GTX 280 + Phenom II X4 920 (orange)
• GTX 280 + Phenom II X4 940  processor (dark blue)

As you can see there is some performance difference, but not a lot. It has a lot to do with this being a GPU bound game though.

Now for each game benchmark I'll also add overclocking results as promised. So each second chart will show:

• GTX 280 + Phenom II X4 920 (2.8 GHz)
• GTX 280 + Phenom II X4 940 (3.0 GHz)
• GTX 280 + Phenom II X4 940 (overclocked at 3.8 GHz)

Especially in the lower resolutions where you are not GPU bound the overclock will start to show. But let's move onwards to a modern game title, Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway.