9600XT + F.E.A.R = forget it?

J

jon67

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Oct 29, 2004
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Friend of mine wants to play FEAR and asked if his system can handle it (9600XT, 2.8GHz P4, 1GB RAM). I suspect his vid card will suffer and maybe the CPU as well.

Should he bother buying the game at all, and if yes what kind of resolution/IQ/playing experience should he expect?
 
It MAY run, but it will look pretty bad, and even at low res/settings his frames won't be high.
 
I can actually run at medium with decent frames. Or at least, I know it can be run at medium. I set all my settings manually. I recommend 800 x 600 with 2x AA and Trilinear filtering. won't look to pretty, but it will still be good enough for gaming.
 
The CPU and ram should be alright, but that video card will definately suffer, very poor quality.
 
Thanks for the replies, 800x600 and medium settings are noted.

Panda man I see your vid card has 256MB, think my friend's got 128MB. My feeling is that the GPU is the bottleneck and there won't be much of a difference between 256 and 128MB at 800x600 res, am I right?
 
it will run for sure. i ran it on my 128MB 9200SE. if this card can run it anything can. just dont expect the game to look any good.
 
jon67 said:
Panda man I see your vid card has 256MB, think my friend's got 128MB. My feeling is that the GPU is the bottleneck and there won't be much of a difference between 256 and 128MB at 800x600 res, am I right?
Click to expand...
you might see a drop in frames, nothing TOO big, but you may need to lower the settings just a tad (then again, you probably won't have to)
 
F.E.A.R. is a hungry game, a 9600 will play it, albeit at low settings.
 
On my 128MB 9800SE in my non-gaming computer, which I would expect is about as powerful as a 9600XT, I was able to play it on 800x600, 2x Antisoptric Filtering, and almost all medium settings (no antialising though). It actually looked pretty good. Not as good as full settings @ 1280x1024 on my X850XT PE, but still pretty good.

I actually got it to run on my brother's laptop with integrated ATI EXPRESS 200M graphics. It looked horrible. 640x480, all lowest settings. I didn't have to turn on pixel doubling though. :)
 
Actually, assuming that 9800se is a type 1 (128bit ram) it's probably about half as powerful as that 9600xt. However, if it is a type2 9800se it has 256 bit ram and is about 10% less powerful than the 9600xt.

~Adam
 
OFCOURSE IT WILL PLAY! you dudes are spoiled! 9000 Pro over here and I play F.E.A.R. every week! What settings? some low, high, but most medium, and I'm still getting 12 frames!

OWNED.
 
I have seen a thread over at the pc gaming forum of rage3d and some guy was able to play fear with a 128MB Radeon 8500
 
Seems like he's going to upgrade his vid card, he wants to play at native res (1280x1024). I mentioned X1600Pro or 6800GS/7800GS as decent AGP candidates, any thoughts?
 
Or you could always get a Sapphire X850XT if you can find the AGP version anywhere anymore. Supposedly, the price has dropped on Sapphire ones down to $250.
 
Panda Man said:
7800GS AGP = overpriced and useless, the beandwidth that AGP gives is insufficient IMO to provide much of a preformance boost. I really don't see much of a performance gain between it and the 680GS/GT

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=382&card2=202

I would go with the 6800GS. btw, X1600XT vs. 6800GS = 6800GS, I am ATi fan andeven I say that the GS is the clear winner here.
Click to expand...

its funny that you consider the 6800GS a clear winner yet the faster 7800GS you characterize as useless

It may be overpriced but that depends on the view (and wallet) of the person considering it
 
Check my sig, I got the 9600xt :\ and just played through the single player demo on 'Auto-Detect' which set many settings to medium with the 640x480 res. Looked like shithole, and wasent 100% smooth, but it ran ok and was playable. Not an experience to write home about, however.

I really need a agp card..
 
needmorecarnitine said:
its funny that you consider the 6800GS a clear winner yet the faster 7800GS you characterize as useless

It may be overpriced but that depends on the view (and wallet) of the person considering it
Click to expand...

Believe he's talking performance-$$ ratio.
 
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