F.E.A.R. (pc)

[ascender]

I'm having some strange performance problems, what's a Radeon X800 Pro like these days? Bit long in the tooth?

Other than that I'm running 1Gb RAM with a P4 2.8GHz which has coped well with everything recently.

The AI is superb - I was almost taken aback when I saw how the soldiers were reacting to me but I'm still a bit underwhelmed at the moment.

[Supergoal]

it now runs between 30 to 15fps

Ugghh unplayable frame rates.... Even on the system you have.
What would the difference be with similar setting but with a GeForce 7800 card instead?

[Kotatsu Neko]

Ugghh unplayable frame rates.... Even on the system you have.
What would the difference be with similar setting but with a GeForce 7800 card instead?

It's probably down to me running it native res on my flat panel. The game is full of stencil shadows and pixel shaders. It also has some lovely volumetric lighting which drops the frame rate to about 5fps...

I think the 7800 is a pretty big step up from the 6800. Should be a lot faster, but I don't have any figures.

[Supergoal]

I ordered the 7800 mobility card which is a laptop version of the desktop card and from what I've read it performs almost as well as its desktop counterpart.

Though I've heard only bad things about people trying to run this game with fast systems with anything more than 40fps.........................

[EvilBoris]

If I did the auto detect I got medium and high and it ran at 100% above 40

[smokedog]

I think the 7800 is a pretty big step up from the 6800. Should be a lot faster, but I don't have any figures.

I hope so, I'm selling my 6800GT for a 7800. Now just need to order that 24" Dell LCD monitor

[Kotatsu Neko]

Just played through Chapter 4. Some really cool moments in there with these ninja sorts who bounce off walls, have cloaking devices, and blast electrcity everywhere when shot.

Sadly they didn't last long and it was back to shooting soldiers again.

The graphics are intetesting in this game. On one hand they are packed with masses of effects - you have reflections, refractions, specularity, normal maps, projected textures, stencil shadows etc etc. It has the lot. But on the other the choice of subject matter in the environments is a little disappointing - it's all office blocks!

I'm finding I'm getting bored after playing for more than an hour or so as it's all quite repetetive. But the ninja bits hint at better things to come.

What's missing I think is a sense of character, which is a shame as previous Monolith games have been full of it. I loved No-One Lives Forever 1 & 2, and Tron. This is good, but feels somewhat generic by comparison, even with the little horror cut scenes in there.

[StanBush]

Is there anyway to make this play in 1280*1040 only option i get is 1152*864 which is making my viewsonic complain.

[Kotatsu Neko]

Is there anyway to make this play in 1280*1040 only option i get is 1152*864 which is making my viewsonic complain.

Unfortunately Monolith seem to only support by default a very small number of resolutions, but the game engine can handle many more.

Go to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Shared Documents\Monolith Productions\FEAR\ then open up settings.cfg. You can then enter whatever res you fancy into the "Screen Width" and "Screen Height" fields.

You can also turn vSync on there which makes the game look much tidier. (although does cause a slight drop to the frame rate)

[StanBush]

Niceone cheers - with the veiwsonic if you dont have the resolution at the native 1280*1040 you keep getting a pop up asking you to switch to it , pain in the arse.

[EvilBoris]

On my viewsonic you can turn that pop up off in the menu, it stops all those annoying things when you boot up

[StanBush]

On my viewsonic you can turn that pop up off in the menu, it stops all those annoying things when you boot up

Thanks for that have turned it off now , never noticed that option only had the screen a couple of weeks cheers.

[Pezley]

playing through this now, seems very good.

all teh complaints about it being un optimized are tosh, run everything at max settings and it is awful, on my 6800gt medium setting run very smooth and looks great, people just cant accept these games are not made with current graphics cards in mind.

upto level 4, the horror element hasnt really kicked in yet, just been gunning mercs. Some of the gun fights are pretty intense, has taken a couple of goes to get through one of them.

so far so good

[VR46]

Not played the full game myself yet but really enjoyed the demo, will pick it up in few weeks, see it's been patched (to 1.01) on day of release joys of PC gaming eh, fixes few multiplayer bugs.

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=61323

[Concept]

I'm half-impressed, half-severly unimpressed with this.

On the one hand, from a cinematic perspective it seems to be great from what little I've played. On the other... the engine is so poorly optimised. I'm using AMD 3200+, 1GB Ram, 256MB x800Pro, and at 1024x768 (without AA and some effects to medium) it's chugging a heck of a lot.

There's judders and crashing pauses (i.e. the frame-rate lowering to nothing) all over the place. Poor to be honest... especially in comparison to what I've seen a number developers push out of current generation console hardware this year on a fraction of the specification.