10 - Game performance: GRAW2 | 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 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 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 effect 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

In 98% of today's games CPU cores wise whether you have 2, 3 or 4 CPU cores it will seriously not make a lot of difference unless you are on SLI/Crossfire/Triple or Quad SLI, most games will only utilize a maximum of two simultaneous cores. For that matter, a faster dual-core processor will give you more performance than a slightly slower 3 or 4 core processor.

With that sentiment explained, look at the results above. Scary how close performance is eh?

In this test we used one of my favorite mid-range graphics cards, a GeForce 9800 GTX+
And to get you an idea of the integrated GPU performance (scaling wise) check out the light blue line. For an integrated GPU it's however pretty fast.

Bear in mind that we compare our test results with our standard test-system, which has a dual-core 3.0 GHz Core 2 Duo processor.

F.E.A.R. is somewhat GPU dependant though. As you can see, virtually not a difference on any of the platforms.

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2

Don't mistake the PC version for being a port of the Xbox 360 game. The PC version has larger and different levels than those featured on the Xbox 360, as well as a different graphics engine and style of gameplay.

The game itself looks great and the intricate physics modelling seen in the singleplayer version is still active in the multiplayer version. There are all sorts of other interactions you'll encounter in multiplayer.
For instance, aluminum cans litter the street and stepping on them not only kicks them around, but also creates a loud sound that may betray your presence to the enemy.

And here are the results done with the newer GRAW2. Image Quality settings:

• Edge Smoothing Anti Aliasing
• 16x Anisotropic Filtering
• Dynamic Shadows HIGH

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.

Interestingly enough COD4 benefits from CPU differences, though only 15%, the GF9300 platform in this run was faster than our typical test-system. Not bad.