Sapphire Radeon HD 5750

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.

Things were beginning to look a bit rough for the HD 5750 with our Crysis Warhead test, but F.E.A.R. 2 is helping the card’s road to recovery. Here, the card is consistently faster than the GTS 250. This again isn’t a major surprise, since like Crysis Warhead, F.E.A.R. 2 usually favors ATI cards.

F.E.A.R. 2 might be a leading PC title where graphics are concerned, but it doesn’t require an ultra-powerful machine for a gamer to experience it at high-end settings. Thanks to this, all of our cards, ranging from $130 up to $500 are able to handle the game at the max detail settings. Better cards will make the game more fluid, of course, but none of these throttle gameplay at those settings.