So why does F.E.A.R. run like crap?

[littlewing]

It basically looks like Doom 3 with a few extra features such as improved shadowing, facial expressions, and a little better lighting. But why does it run sooooo much worse than Half Life 2 or Doom 3? I mean those games on their most maxed out settings run better on my pc than F.E.A.R. on medium settings. Half Life 2 still is the best engine out there.

My specs:
3000+ AMD Athlon 64 Venice
1 gig ram
MSI 6800 vanilla 128mb

 

[mOeeOm]

F.E.A.R is poorly optimized...and now they wanna be cute and try to optimize it for dual-core? haha they cudnt do it on single-core...good luck I'm staying away from this game till they release several patches to fix it.

 

[Kaifu]

So, you're comparing the performance of a game yet to be released with something that was released over nine months ago... OK...

I'm not saying you're completely nuts here. There are a -few- places in the single-player demo where my framerate tanks too, but you're playing with a 128MB card where 256MB is now the standard for most video cards. I'm also using things like onboard sound (and not a particularly good onboard sound comparatively) so I don't push the settings up on Audio.

If it's not a limitation of your hardware, are you running with the latest drivers for your video card? I don't know if this is the case for F.E.A.R. but I recall that Monolith had a partnership with ATI for the promotion of The Matrix Online during E3 two years ago. Maybe the game is better optimized for ATI cards and only slightly less so for nVidia? I haven't read anything about an ATI partnership for FEAR, though, so perhaps this isn't the case.

Are there certain areas of the demo where the game gets chunky or is it pretty much the whole thing?

With new games like this, the mantra always seems to be "Computer game software sales help push hardware."

My old Gainward GeForce4 Ti4200 worked great on games like Asheron's Call 2 (which, believe you me, was a serious resource hog), but could barely run MxO even with the settings turned way down.

In other words devs use the latest cards to make their games look better than the preceding stuff, but sometimes that means the consumer has to go out and get a new video card to see good performance from the game.

Carmack was the main player in this game for the longest time, but other developers caught on.

 

[littlewing]

Ok well i got the game on medium-high settings at 1280x960 resolution and no AA and medium texturing but max other things. I dunno there are soo many options. Anyhow, it feels like i'm playing at 30fps and it feels like it dips to 20 during heavy action. Not good in my book.

 

[Kaifu]

Have you tried running fraps in the background while you play to check framerate?

 

[imported_g33k]

Originally posted by: littlewing
Ok well i got the game on medium-high settings at 1280x960 resolution and no AA and medium texturing but max other things. I dunno there are soo many options. Anyhow, it feels like i'm playing at 30fps and it feels like it dips to 20 during heavy action. Not good in my book.

Yeah use FRAPS don't guess. It runs fine at 12x9 w/o aa or af on this system. NO slow downs whatsoever. Not the greatest but the game still looks good.

 

[ronnn]

Thought it looked great on my 9700pro, even on medium settings. I will buy it when it comes out - seemed like a great game unlike that other game the op compared it too.

 

[Polish3d]

Totally agree with OP. I posted about this the other day. FEAR is designed like hell. A 7800GTX/FX-55 system only gets 54fps with NO ANTI-ALIASING AT 1024x768!!! That's obscene. And not the hardware's fault

 

[Bateluer]

Originally posted by: littlewing

My specs:
3.0ghz AMD Athlon 64 Venice
1 gig ram
MSI 6800 vanilla 128mb

I don't think you have a 3Ghz A64. Thats one hell of an overclock if you do though.

FEAR ran fairly well on y 3.4Ghz P4 with 6800GT though it did bog down a little during scenes of intense action. I could have turned down the visuals a little to solve that problem though.

Also, I suspect, both the game and drivers will improve before the game's release, allowing more performance.

 

[dug777]

as has been said i suspect there is still some work to be done optimizing it, and driver work too....

 

[deadseasquirrel]

According to gamespot:

Unlike the previous times we've seen it, this time the game had been clearly optimized and had hardly any frame rate problems (though we did play the game on a top-of-the-line PC setup). We're told by producer Rob Loftus that "if you have a computer that can play Half-Life 2, you can play F.E.A.R.," because even though the game has some support for older-generation DirectX 8.0 video cards, it is intended for use with DirectX 9.0 hardware.

 

[grimdeath]

i was having problems with it running 512m but now its running GREAT at 1gb using ocz platinum, could really tell the difference when i upgraded recently

 

[Hacp]

You need dual 7800GTX+ 3.5GHZ A64 X2 +3 Gigs of ram DDR800 1.5-2-2-5 to run it smoothly.

 

[monster64]

Originally posted by: Hacp
You need dual 7800GTX+ 3.5GHZ A64 X2 +3 Gigs of ram DDR800 1.5-2-2-5 to run it smoothly.

Sure, at 2500x1600 x14aa x16af, with every single setting maxed out.

 

[littlewing]

I just ran Doom3 retail for a bit. I'm still playing through the first 30 minutes of it and ran through a little bit after all hell breaks loose. I was running on ultra quality at 1280x1024 resolution, all settings maxed, 4xAA and I was getting around 35-40fps avg. 60fps max, 20fps at lowest. And plus, it looks a helluva lot better than FEAR.

 

[TWills]

I'd say ram is the main thing for FEAR. I run 1gb normally. Then I put a buddies' ram in (additional 1gb) and got much nicer frames. I'm sure having 256 on the video card would be good too...

 

[Polish3d]

Originally posted by: monster64

Originally posted by: Hacp
You need dual 7800GTX+ 3.5GHZ A64 X2 +3 Gigs of ram DDR800 1.5-2-2-5 to run it smoothly.

Sure, at 2500x1600 x14aa x16af, with every single setting maxed out.

Actually there is a guy here with 7800GTX in SLI and A64 and he only gets 55fps with high settings at 1280 x 1024