FEAR on a FX 5650 Go / Inspiron 8600

[Guest Jason Umiker]

I have a Dell Inspiron 8600 w/ 1.7Ghz Dothan, 768MB RAM and a Nvidia GeForce FX 5650 Go 128MB. I am able to run Doom III, Half-Life 2 and Quake 4 all very well. However, I just bought FEAR and even with all of the options turned all of the way down - Minimal they call it (which it's autoselect utility did for me) - it is well under 20fps and is soo choppy that I can't even play it. This is with a level of quality and detail that reminds me of the old software renderer for Quake 1 it is soo pixelated and unimpressive.

With Doom III perforance improved dramatically with newer Nvidia drivers. However, in my experience the new drivers have been running worse and worse on my card and, except for trying the lastest 81.85 to see if it would help FEAR, I have stuck with the good old 67.66 which seemed to give me the best performance in Doom III and Half-Life 2.

They say that the minimal is a GeForce 4 TI should my card should be quite a bit better than. Is there any hope that some newer driver will make this game playable? Or should I just take it back?

I appreciate any insight and help.

[Bill]

Link me to the demo and I will try it, my card is similar to a GF 4 TI.

Your card should run it decently, but it might be designed for faster GF6 cards, I do not know much about this game though.

If other games run good for you and newer drivers don't help it is probably the game and you might need some serious performance enhancements to make it run good.

Edited October 22, 2005 by Bill

[Guest Jason Umiker]

Demo is availible at ftp://ftp.sierra.com/pub/sierra/fear/demo/fear_spdemo_en.exe

After reading the Anandtech article on this some of the much higher end mainstream cards like the GeForce 6600 and Radeon X800 you have to turn the settings down and even some of the cards like the 7800GTX can't run it with everything on so this turns out to be quite the demanding game...

That still doesn't change the point that after seeing what Half-Life 2's source entine and Doom III's engine can do with my card I should still be able to at least play this. If they are blowing off the entire NVidia FX series of video cards even running their game then that is rather stunning... Everybody else seems to be able to release a code-path that supports some of the older cards and it is wise not to alienate such a large installed base. I guess that rather resource-hungry unoptimized games like this are necessary for Nvidia and ATI to sell their new wiz-bang $350 video cards, though.

I am interesting to see how it runs on your GeForce 4 TI series card - I believe my FX5650 card clocked at 240 GPU / 500 MEM should be at least as good but they specifically mention that card as being compatible then skip all of the FX up until the 5900 series on their hardware compatibility list. Anybody know why that would be? Was the 5650 really that deficient? Will NVidia actually realease a new driver that doesn't make things run worse for a card of my generation anytime again in the future (it used to be that things got faster with new driver releases from them...)? I guess the only option that may be better for my system is that can replace it with a Radeon 9600 part from Dell - is that a superior part that is worth spending the money?

[Bill]

The demo runs very good on my laptop unless I have the settings set way too high.

At medium system and around low/custom gf settings it probably runs a little too fast even. :)

It could probably handle medium, and I could go higher if my card and system both had more RAM, 64MB video RAM is definitely no where near what you need to run this game at its highest.

After messing with it some more, I might be able to provide some good sugestions, you might want to start by going here and forcing the game to think you have an older card.

http://www.tommti-systems.com/main-Dateien/files.html

Download 3Danylzer and force some lower pixel shader settings, or make it think you have the GF4 Ti card, should work.