You aren't a soldier. You are a weapon. A paramilitary force infiltrates a multi billion dollar aerospace compound taking hostages, but issuing no demands.

The government responds by sending in its best special operations teams, only to have them obliterated. Live footage of the massacre is cut short by an unexpected wave of destruction that leaves military leaders stunned and in disbelief.

First Encounter Assault Recon (F.E.A.R.) is one of the new-generation FPS. The graphics are really stunning, the plot behind the whole shooting successfully keeps it interesting and even the A.I. seems to work well.

F.E.A.R. offers a lot to the First Person Shooter world. The graphics are very clear with excellent textures, great new effects that will stress your graphics card and rag-doll physics that are waiting to be exploited as you progress through the game.

- Benchmark Settings

F.E.A.R. allows you test the video settings with a mini-benchmark involving a lot of weapon firing, explosions and several other effects. After the benchmark is run, you're presented with a screen showing your minimum, average and maximum framerates and also percentages of how often the framerate was below 25fps, between 25 and 40, and finally above 40. For presentation reasons, we're just sticking to the minimum and average framerates.

The resolutions we used are 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200. We measured performance with high and highest details.

Judging by the minimum framerate at the standard TFT resolution of 1280x1024, you realise immediately that gameplay was not a joy with the X600XT and the single N6600GT. However, teaming up two of the N6600GTs does the trick and the minimum fps rises to 24. Concerning the rest of the bundle, the 6800Ultra drops to 24fps at 1600x1200, while all the 7800's keep the minimum framerate above 30fps.

Highest settings really stress all the cards to their limits. It seems only the Aopen 7800GTX SLI can keep the framerate above 25 during the benchmark at 1280x1024. Even so, we see that the most powerful combination of currently available cards fails and drops below 25 at the highest resolution of 1600x1200.