FEAR

This manual run through was used to evaluate performance in this ?office space shooter?, while this game doesn?t offer a colorful game environment it?s packed with high detail textures and cool graphical effects like the bullet-time power-up.

At 1280x1024 4xAA/8xAF could be enabled although you?ll do experience some dips in FPS, the average frame rate remained playable.



At 1600x1200 AA was reduced to 2x which kept frame rates close to those at 1280x1024 with 4xAA.



The average frame rate with the Sparkle is now up ?3? compared to the equally clocked Club 3D, not bad, but as you can see overclocking the GPU will most likely offset any small difference had from the extra memory.



Oblivion

One of the most (if not most!) system taxing games to have come out this year, Oblivion can bring any system to its knees when the in-game details are set to maximum values. We set the texture to high, every option to ?on? and the sliders were left in the middle except for: Tree Fade (more to the left ? lower) , Actor Fade (more to the right ? higher), View Distance (set to highest), In/Ext Shadows (set to almost lowest), Self Shadow (off), Bloom (off).

HDR was enabled which on nVIDIA hardware disables anti aliasing. The game section chosen was outside running walking from the mountains towards the main gate with the big tower in plain view. You can view an in-game recording of the manual run-through here.



The impact of extra GPU power is only minimal this time, unless you radically set higher speeds like seen with the eVGA card.



Average frame rates drop for all video cards, the game was not very playable at this resolution; only with the eVGA card the FPS remained high enough throughout the manual run through to be called fluent.

256Mb vs 512Mb: while the average and minimum values don?t seem to differ much, the squiggly chart actually becomes useful here, as you can see that the Sparkle delivers higher frame rates in this game; not +10FPS, but a small edge nonetheless.