FEAR - First thoughts and benchmarks

I put my FilePlanet subscription to good use and downloaded the demo in about 15 minutes, installed it and fired it up. 20 minutes later, I was done... but shaking from FEAR.

I knew it was going to be creepy, but the little girl appearing in front of you and then the guy at the bottom of the ladder... eek! My brother kept sneaking up behind me and tapping my shoulder in as I was walking around the level, the bar-steward.

I can't wait for this game to be released! It's so much scarier than a movie because you're actually part of the action.

 

Agreed all round

 

Hehe I was showing my girlfriend the demo at that point, and we both screamed
What the game does manage to do is produce that eerie there's-a-ghost kind of feeling, something which I was sceptical about at first but they pulled it off, it took me no more than 10 seconds to convince me it was going to be the best horror/thriller experience yet

 

As i mentioned in another thread, i just got my hands on a couple of Gainward 7800Ulta GTX Golden Samples which Tim Smalley (aka bigz) has just reviewed and gave Bit-Tech Excellence Award - Full article >>here<< so i thought i would download the newly released F.E.A.R. Demo at (650MB) and see how the 2x Sli 7800's coped.

Not really surprisingly they took everything in their stride with everything set to max in the game though one thing that looked great at first, started to get on my wick a bit was the shadow feature........

........i found myself backed up against a wall with a light behind me and six guys shooting the sh t out of me which i couldn't see because my shadow was cast across them making the impossible to see. I didn't manage to get that screen grab obviously as i was to busy shooting in the dark but i captured a similar one below.

Personally i would definitely say F.E.A.R. is worth downloading even at 650MB as some of the graphics are mind boggling and the game play is brilliant.......its a kind of Doom3 and HL2 rolled into one.

Anyway all the pictures are clickable to view in 1024 (thats as far as i got)

Obviously better pictures will be published by Bit-Tech in their full game review.

 

I'de have to say that F.E.A.R looks better in both character models and backgrounds compared to HL2 and Doom 3, however they really have to work on the gun and hand models, they just dont look good compared to the rest of the game.

 

wtf.. never had that happen
does anyone else with a 7800 have issues wit hteh shadows in the game?
a friend of mine has a 7800 and soft shadows look like this:
http://www.filefarmer.com/Drunkenmaster/Fear/FEARSPDemo-200516-44.jpg
they dont look anything like that on my x800xl
how are they supposed to look?

 

It's not hard to have better world detail than Source, but character models in Source are generally as good as FEAR imo. Lip syncing and facial expressions Source are the kings amungst gods.

 

when playing is it better to have vsync on or off. also, i have really low fps under 10 during fights. how can i improve my fps? i love the slowmo. i need to find time to beat the demo though, and that girl looks like the ring girl, kinda.

 

Turn off the shadows, its what i do to run it at decent quality + decent framerate. You dont really need the shadows, and i kept getting scared and thinking it was someone else, so i just turned them off all together .

 

Mine don't look quite like that in that scene, from what I remember, but certainly the method of rendering "soft shadows" just kinda looks like drawing the shadow a few times over, and offsetting a few pixels, with transparency. Meaning they sometimes don't look quite as l33t as you'd hope. In general, I think the overall shadowing rocks, which they're sharp or soft-edged

 

I've not dabbled with soft shadows yet - kills the perf too much on any hardware I've tried so far. Even with 2GB memory.

 

Id have to say i found it fairly average - performance wasnt spectacular on my system (9800 pro, 2500 @ 2000mhz) but it was playable. The little girl wasnt scary in the slightest, overall i found the demo boring, and 'wtf its over?' fast.

Blatent max payne bullet time and 'nightmare' scenes rip off.

 

Well I thought it was creepy as hell. I felt the hair s rise on my arms and my neck a few times.

However... performance... oh dear... running on my signature rig, I have to use 800x600 with lowest everything, and no shadows to approach playable fps.

Is this the shape of things to come? Where's Rotosequence telling me I don't need a high end upgrade in THIS thread?

 

^_^ I feel proud that i ended up buying a 6600GT instead of a 9800 way back when. ~Currently running on High CPU and medium graphics at 1024x768 without shadows~

Edit: I'm also only running a gig of Standard Corsair XMS and a A64 3000+...you can only run it on lowest settings with your system? you sure there isnt a problem?

 

Performance for me was an issue.

Amd Athlon xp 1800+
512mb whatever ddr400
Pny GeForce FX5500 128mb

Once I got down those 3 ladders, and as I walked toward that cone shaped light, FPS dipped way too low. I had at least 30ms lag between left mouse click to actually seeing the firearm fire.

Sigh, time to step up to A64 + 6600GT.

 

None that I know about. FarCry is fine... can play that with pretty much everything on, but with particle count down to medium (i get a big performance hit with that on high) and at 1024x788. FRAPS records around 30fps.. that's with 4xaa and 4 af.

Just FEAR... runs like a pig. To get it playable, I need it to be 800x600, almost everything on minimum, and no shadows. SHadows are the killer.... but the volumetric lighting hits me hard too.

There are links to my benchmarks on ORB in my sig.. the system is sound......The 9800 just doesn't cut it with this game I'm afraid.

It's 7800GT time me thinks.. Oh, hang on... it's not an AGP card... make that 7800GT and Mobo time... oh bugger... my CPU is 754.. make that 7800GT, Mobo and CPU time.... oh, nads!... my PSU is not ATX 2.0, so can't have DFI board.... make that.....

Bollox!!! I need a new PC!!

 

+1

only way i could get decent play was to turn everything off. but i was actually surprised i could run it with my alienware laptop, 2.8 P4, 5600go128, 1gb 2700, etc. soon to be upgraded!!!

only got a few min into it and died. pretty much awesome game, scaryiest game since RE4.

so those of you with 7800s are you getting good FPS? i read the few that posted, but i want to hear more! i am getting one soon hopefully, along with a new desktop lol. laptops suck for gaming.

i might only have 10 posts, but im not new.

id like to change that 'whats a dremel' as i have the full dremel kit, with the flex head?? lol

 

That's totally realistic though. Turn on one lamp in a dark room and stand in front of it. You see your shadow is proportionaly larger the closer you are to the light. It's not a bug in this case, it's just an effect of the very realistic simulation so you can't really fault them for that.

I am however going to have to call BS on your saying this was a problem during a fight. The game (or at least the demo) is rather cleverly designed so that only transitional areas where the spooky scripted events occur are poorly lit. Each of the five areas in the demo where you engage enemies are well lit by comparison, and each has an overhead light, such that a shadow such as you describe is not possible.

I'm thinking that you noticed this particular effect in one of the transitional areas and thought it would be clever to mentally apply it to one of the fight areas and criticize the game for it. That's ok we all do a little internet BSing now and then, but in this case your fabrication is transparent.

If you do present a screenshot showing said situation then I apologize in advance and admit my mistake, but until that time....