ASUS GeForce 210, GT 220 & GT 240

Five out of the seven current games we use for testing are either sequels, or titles in an established series. F.E.A.R. 2 is one of the former, following up on the very popular First Encounter Assault Recon, released in fall of 2005. This horror-based first-person shooter brought to the table fantastic graphics, ultra-smooth gameplay, the ability to blow massive chunks out of anything, and also a very fun multi-player mode.

Three-and-a-half years later, we saw the introduction of the game’s sequel, Project Origin. As we had hoped, this title improved on the original where gameplay and graphics were concerned, and it was a no-brainer to want to begin including it in our testing. The game is gorgeous, and there’s much destruction to be had (who doesn’t love blowing expensive vases to pieces?). The game is also rather heavily scripted, which aides in producing repeatable results in our benchmarking.

Manual Run-through: The level used for our testing here is the first in the game, about ten minutes in. The scene begins with a travel up an elevator, with a robust city landscape behind us. Our run-through begins with a quick look at this cityscape, and then we proceed through the level until the point when we reach the far door as seen in the above screenshot.

At 1024×768, F.E.A.R. 2 was fairly playable on all of our above configurations, with 1280×1024 running well on the GT 220. The performance overall sure isn’t anything worth bragging about, but for such a great-looking game, the performance we saw wasn’t too bad.

The trend continues, with our GT 240 falling well behind the HD 5670. F.E.A.R. 2, like Call of Juarez, seems to favor AMD, but the differences here are still rather stark even so.

Like some of the previous titles, the GT 240 performed well enough to hold onto the same settings we used for testing above, while the rest of the cards had to see notched-down settings before we could consider the game to be playable.