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 to 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.

In F.E.A.R., with High Settings at 1280x1024 resolution, the XFX 7800 GT reported the highest minimum fps and it is quite strange that the 7800 GTX card had the lowest framerate at this resolution, although at 1600x1200, the 7800 GTX is on the top again. With average fps for 1280x1024 and High Settings, we notice that there is very little between the three cards.

With Highest Settings in place, F.E.A.R. seems to prefer the ATI based Club 3D X1800XT card. Not only does it produce the highest framerate at all resolutions, but by quite a margin as well.