10 - Game performance: FEAR | COD4
Gaming: F.E.A.R.
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 power capable of controlling battalions of soldiers and a habit of feeding off any poor unfortunate innocents - presumably to aid his powers of concentration. It doesnt 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 a 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
So here we took a selection of resolutions & image quality settings the way you guys actually game. We could lower the resolution to 640x480 .. but honestly .. what's the friggin point really ? You game at 10x7 or higher.
We take the Q6600 processor and test it at the GA-X48-DQ6, eVGA nForce 750 SLI FTW and ECS X48 mainboard. The green line is (in all benchmarks) the ECS board with the Q6600. Correct observation .. there is no difference.
That's the reality on how close performance is guys ... also in there is the same priced Phenom 9850 processor on a budget mainboard. This is text-book classic baseline performance.
Gaming: Call of Duty 4
Activision recently released Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the next installment in the popular war game series. Moving away from the World War II setting, Modern Warfare instead centers around a conflict involving Russia and the Middle East. And hey, you even get to die ... and then continue the game in the past.
Image Quality setting:
- 4x Anti Aliasing
- 16x anisotropic filtering
- All settings maxed out
If you thought it would be different with Call of Duty ... sorry mate, only at 10x7 we notice a teeny weenie difference, likely due to the DDR3 memory.
