FEAR
FEAR (Direct X)
One of the most impressive games of E3 2005 is turning out to be one of the most graphically intense as well.
*** Note: we have disabled Soft Shadows in all the below tests despite what the screen indicates above. And since we were using the retail game this time, I opted to use the in-game “settings test” fly by to compare performance.
Even though FEAR uses Direct 3D for its rendering, the NVIDIA software engineers were able to find away to properly implement AFR in FEAR and get around the “D3D limitation” that is hitting some other titles we have tested. Because of this, we can use in-game settings for image quality and get a more direct comparison of a single 7950 GX2 card and two of them in Quad SLI configurations.
Even at the “low” resolution of 1600×1200, the Quad SLI configuration is able to achieve a 16% performance lead over the single 7950 GX2 and a 55% gain over dual 7900 GTX cards in SLI mode! That is damn impressive, but even more so is the 71% advantage it has over the single 7950 GX2 when running at the 2560×1600 resolution of the Dell 30″ monitor. Gaming at this resolution was impressive to see, though I would probably recommend moving down one step to gett higher minimum frame rates like we saw in the 2048×1536 tests.
