FEAR optimal settings get lowered for retail game?

[hans030390]

I picked up a copy of FEAR (Wally world has em for $40, cheaper than anywhere i've seen) and I was excited to play the game like i had in the demo. The demo put my graphics up to mostly maximum (minus AA/AF, soft shadows, some lighting effects, etc) at 10x7 and it ran well (stutters, but playable)...the demo ran very very well on settings like that.

then i get the retail game. It puts my settings around medium on 800x600 and I expect that it's just being cautious. So, I bump it up to the settings that the demo set for me and it gives me some crap about video memory. I go on to take the benchmark that came with the game (MP demo and retail game) and with the EXACT same settings, i somehow get much lower framerates and a lot of stuttering. Also, the game runs worse than the SP demo did (less stuttering, but lower FPS) and looks worse.

What's up with this? I thought the game was optimized. It's really disappointing going from a demo on high settings to a retail game on lower settings...and performance decreases.

Any logical explanation for this?

 

[supastar1568]

it was like that for me with the BF2 demo. My average FPS dropped about 10 for the full version..


I swear they optimize the DEMO better so that more people will buy the non-optimized full version.

 

[n7]

D00d, a lot of game demos don't have all the features, graphically anyway from what i understand.

Also, you cannot expect to play FEAR any any decent settings with 512 MB RAM! I'd recommend saving your pennies for at least another 512 MB.

 

[moonboy403]

i had to lower the texture to medium in order to prevent the stuttering and i had 1 gig of ram

 

[orangat]

Originally posted by: moonboy403
i had to lower the texture to medium in order to prevent the stuttering and i had 1 gig of ram

I had to do the same thing too. Textures on maximum produced so much stuttering on the demo and retail version it was unplayable.

I don't think there was a significant boost in performance between both versions. Maybe for the new 18xx/7series card but its dissapointing having to play without AA and bumping the res down to 1024x768.

The manual actually stated 1Gb/6600GT as optimal which is laughable.

 

[hans030390]

So are you saying that the demo's Maximum graphics settings were more like...medium/high for the retail game? If that's not the case, than I ran it fine on 512mb of ram on high settings.

It's just confusing to me. I'll probably just manually set everything.

What really gets me is why it recommends 800x600 now on medium settings, where it used to recommend 10x7 on high. not only is that going from high to medium settings, but it also jumps down in resolution. and the framerate isn't any better from the demo.

so does the game just have improved graphics from the demo then? that could be he case.

 

[orangat]

You may be right since I didn't notice any performance/gfx improvements. FEAR is ridiculously HW hungry and I'm not pleased at all.

Manually setting texture resolution to medium fixed the stuttering problem to a large extent. This problem was not fixed from the demo version for people who have 'only' 1Gb RAM.

These are the other settings for acceptable fps on a 6800GT (acceptable may be diff for others) - 1024x768, effects med, volumetric off, water min, textures med, AA off, AF 4x. The rest remain at max.

 

[hans030390]

Interesting, I got the new official nvidia drivers, and for some reason my game is back up to it's "demo" settings and running like it should.

So that's one problem solved. BUT, now the game freezes every 5 minutes. and i have to restart the computer. ugh.