IQ Compared

Adjusting video settings

Monolith provides a wealth of tweaking options inside F.E.A.R.’s menus. Like most games, F.E.A.R. auto-detects your hardware, choosing the best settings for your system, but you can still go in and tweak settings such as shadow and texture quality, water resolution and volumetric lights, while GeForce FX owners can force the use of DX8 shaders. FSAA and texture filtering can also be specified within F.E.A.R. (although ATI’s 6xAA mode currently isn’t implemented) and is the method we used to control these eye candy features for our testing.

Softer shadows

One such setting that we were eager to check out, soft shadows, has traditionally brought with it a significant performance hit. In Chronicle’s of Riddick’s 2.0++ mode for example, performance declined by a factor of 3x once soft shadows were turned on! This was the default mode for GeForce 6 users, leading many of them to mistakenly complain of performance problems with the game. You can see screenshots of the effect here:

Hard shadows

Soft Shadows

Pay careful attention to the shadows being cast by the soldiers, particularly the edges of the shadows. Note how hard the edges of the shadows are when soft shadows is disabled. You can also see this in the shadow of the helicopter as well as the shadow of the platform it rests on.

We’ll examine the performance impact of soft shadows later in this article.

Anti-aliasing

As usual, we were eager to see how well ATI and NVIDIA’s latest and greatest cards handled AA in F.E.A.R. Like DOOM 3, the game doesn’t feature an abundant amount of jaggies (which is only helped further by the game’s dark environments), so AA isn’t as crucial as it is in other titles, but it’s still a feature we suspect most gamers with high-end cards will definitely be turning on.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the screenshots:

ATI AA disabled

NVIDIA AA disabled

ATI 4xAA

NVIDIA 4xAA

As you can see, there’s a bug in the game for GeForce cards that prevents the wall on the left hand side from being rendered properly. Considering the beta nature of the game, this shouldn’t come too unexpected, as Monolith likely still has a number of issues with the game that must be resolved before its release. The NVIDIA board appears to do a slightly better job at clearing up the jaggies on the edge of the catwalk across from you, but as you can see in the screenshots, your position in the NVIDIA shot is slightly left of your character in the ATI screenshot. This could account for some of the difference we’re seeing in both images. We’ll just have to wait for the final game, where we can hopefully record proper demos for testing AA.