After seeing a series of games where settings mattered more than hardware, we're getting back to basics with F.E.A.R--basics as in, the bigger the hardware, the better the gameplay. F.E.A.R. is a power-hungry game that demands sacrificial offerings of high-end CPUs and video cards to run seamlessly. It can run well enough on older hardware, but you're going to have to give up quite a few atmospheric details. For a game that practically oozes tension and suspense, playing without spectacular shadows, textures, and lighting tends to be a letdown. F.E.A.R. is definitely a game that will sell quite a few video cards.

Much to our benefit, F.E.A.R. comes with a built-in performance test. This saved us an enormous amount of time in having to come up with our own reproducible test. Monolith designed the test mainly to stress video cards, and it does so magnificently. We found the built-in test quite accurate for most components, but it doesn't hit the CPU with AI computations since it's still a timedemo at heart.

Since F.E.A.R. is a first person shooter, maintaining frame rates above forty frames per second will be essential. In our book, anything below an average of forty frames per second becomes unplayable when it comes to single player gameplay. If you plan to play online with other people, try to get the most powerful equipment you can afford to avoid dipping into dangerously low frame rates. Online play stresses the game far more than single player play, and you need higher frame rates to compete with live opponents. Our tests show that with a few key component upgrades you can have F.E.A.R. running quite smoothly. The key is to know what parts of your computer to upgrade.

Guide Sections

Expect F.E.A.R. to expose every single performance bottleneck in your system. We've divided our guide into four sections: video card, game settings, CPU, and memory. In each section, we return scores for a wide variety of hardware and mix in a dose of our own in-game experience to explain how our hardware changes affected gameplay.

Game Settings

F.E.A.R. can run quite well if you relax a few graphics settings. Even if you have the best computer on the block, we highly recommend not turning up every feature available. We experimented with the different in-game graphical settings to see which options affect performance the most.

Graphics

F.E.A.R already comes with steep hardware requirements to run well, and one place you don't want to skimp on is the video card. We tested the game with all the modern video cards to see how they perform in F.E.A.R.

CPU

F.E.A.R. requires a minimum of a 1.7GHz Pentium 4, which is rather paltry considering the multi-gigahertz processors available today. We didn't have a PCI Express-enabled test bed that had that slow of a CPU, but we did use our multiplier unlocked Athlon 64 FX-57 to see how well the game performs across different CPU speeds. We reduced the speed of our Athlon 64 down to 2.0GHz, and then further down to 1.4GHz to see how the CPU scaled with performance.

Memory

We varied the amount of system RAM (512MB, 1GB, and 2GB) on our test bed to see how much memory the game needs to run effectively.

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