F.E.A.R. is a game we often used to test the performance of last-generation video cards. It is a title that is rather stressful on the video subsystem, and enabling soft shadows directly stresses the GPU even further. Our copy of the game was patched to Version 1.08. We tested using resolutions of 1600x1200, 1920x1200, and 2560x1600 coupled with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering. In the last test we have 4x AA with soft shadows enabled.

The overclocked 8800s have appreciable gains in performance compared to the 8800 video cards running at stock speeds. The XFX GeForce 8800 GTS XXX has the more notable improvement, and has gains of around 9 frames per second at 1600x1200 and 1900x1200. The XFX GeForce 8800 GTX XXX is able to achieve performance that comes in right behind the Radeon X1950 XTX. All of the video cards see a huge drop in performance at resolutions of 2560x1600. We are not sure whether this is a driver issue, or if this is the result of a bottleneck in the video memory.

Again the XFX 8800s are faster than their stock speed counterparts and are able to perform 10% faster than them.

With soft shadows enabled, the GeForce 8800 architectures are clearly able to outperform previous generation architectures, which have always suffered in performance with this setting enabled.