Gigabyte Radeon HD 4770 512MB

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.

Like Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, F.E.A.R. 2 is another game that doesn’t require a monster of a PC to deliver an enjoyable experience. At 1920×1080, we hit an average FPS of 58.349, and that’s with 4x anti-aliasing. The 36 FPS minimum makes the deal even sweeter, and overall, it’s honestly really impressive. To be able to play a top-rate game like this at a native resolution on your 24″ monitor, on a $100 graphics card… no complaints here.

Similar also to CoJ, we managed to make F.E.A.R. 2 playable at 2560×1600 as long as we removed the anti-aliasing entirely, dropped the anisotropic filtering to 4x and also lowered the texture detail to normal. Aside from those three things, the rest of the details remained at their maximum settings. In the end, we saw great performance at that resolution. There were some points that had slightly noticeable slower performance, but the degree of its effect were so minor that I couldn’t consider it a problem.