11 - Game performance FEAR | Call of Duty 4

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

First off an explanation, where you see the HD 4870 512MB Crossfire noted, that's in fact our test system which has two disadvantages over the Smooth Creations test system. The first being it has 2 GB less memory. But with a 32-bit operating system, the reality is roughly the loss of 1 GB.

Secondly, though the frequency is exactly matched at 3.0 GHz / 1333 MHz FSB, our test system has a dual-core processor. The Smooth creations system has (as stated) exactly the same clocks, yet is quad core.

So focus on the dark blue line (our test-system), and then the green line .. the Quad core based Smooth Creations system with exactly the same graphics cards setup in CrossfireX as well.

To contrast and balance the charts, I included the results taken with on  single Radeon HD 4870 as well, colored in light blue.

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 does not benefit from 2 extra CPU cores. We test at typical game image quality settigns. 4xAA was enabled here with quality settings set to maximum.