F.E.A.R. was one of the most popular games used to benchmark video cards from previous generations. Because of its widespread use, it is an excellent program to compare results to previous architectures. F.E.A.R is a game greatly stresses the video subsystem.

The stress placed on the GPU can be further increased by enabling soft shadows. In previous generations of video cards, enabling soft shadows had a very large negative impact on performance. With the G80 released, we just couldn’t resist trying the game with soft shadows enabled. The main purpose of soft shadows is to add a slight haze to the edge of shadows in order to make them seem more realistic.

The version of F.E.A.R. we used for the tests was 1. 08. We used resolutions of 1600x1200, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600. In the first two tests we used AA 4x and AF 16x while in the last test we used only soft shadows

The GeForce 8800 GTX SLI system outdoes every other video card setup. The GeForce 8800 GTS, on the other hand, performs on par with a single GeForce 8800 GTX card. Both are able to perform better than two 7600 GT cards in SLI. The GTS system had quite high FPS until we set the resolution at 2560x1600 after which it drastically fell to 34 FPS.

The GeForce 8800 SLI setups have the highest minimum frames per second. As can be seen, the only time performance for the 8800 systems dipped into the unplayable range was at 2560x1600.

With Soft Shadows enabled the margin of advantage for the 8800 series increases by a very large amount. As we previously mentioned, Soft Shadows didn’t work very well with previous generations of video cards, however, it seems that that problem has been rectified with the introduction of NVIDIA’s new architecture. In this case, a single GeForce 8800 GTX is able to outdo two GeForce 7900 GT cards under SLI and is also faster than Radeon X1950 XTX. A single GeForce 8800 GTS card is also able to perform faster than the Radeon X1950XTX Crossfire setup.