F.E.A.R.

F.E.A.R. is not a new title anymore, time flies by, released back in October 2005 this game has splendid visuals, even today it you run it high detail it doesn’t look dated at all. You pay a price to get the visual splendor though; a high end card is required to run it fluently at high detail and increased resolution. FEAR is one of the game benchmarks we ran after all the others were finished. We reinstalled the Sparkle 8600 GT and compared it head to head with the XFX 7600 GT, both at stock speeds (do note that the XFX 7600 GT has higher clock speed compared to the original 7600 GT 650Mhz GPU instead of 560Mhz).



We used the build-in benchmark of FEAR, which does an automatic runthrough showing a fire fight, water effects and explosion. First up 1280x1024 no AA but 4xAF enabled:



FEAR is fluently playable at this setting on all cards, between the XFX and Sparkle there is almost no difference, the Club 3D trails noticeably.



At 1600x1200 the difference between all cards has been noticeably reduced, the Club 3D is no almost on par with the other cards.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. an open ended FPS shooter game with high resolution textures and open environment, dynamic day/night cycles and smart AI enemies.



We ran through a night scene where Stalker come crossing through the grass with their spotlights, casting shadows in all directions, this was a very stressful scene which stressed the GPU quite a bit. In-game resolution set at 1280x1024 (0xAA) with medium detail:



No difference between the 8600 GT cards here, the 7600 GT is trailing noticeably, with dips in fps to 20FPS, where the 8600 GT cards are closer to 30.