Benchmarking Your GPU with F.E.A.R. 37
ThinSkin writes "Monolith's new shooter F.E.A.R. is all fun and games, but it can also be used as a benchmark to test your GPU's performance. ExtremeTech's Jason Cross goes into detail on benchmarking your GPU with this graphically-intensive game. In addition, the article also tests the performance of high- and mid-range cards from ATI and Nvidia to see which scores top marks." It's a tough game; I had to buy a new rig.
mid range system (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Get over it. (Score:3, Interesting)
You can make *even better* games by optimizing your resources. Sure you could double the texture resolution [4x the ram] but that only "improves" the game so far. Then you are left over with no memory for say, good AI or physics or whatever.
Having 1600x1200 with 8xAA and 16xAF is not the be-all of gaming. It isn't "advanced" either. Look at SIGGRAPH if you're into "state of the art".
"people like me" are why you have things like the Gameboy to begin with in the first place. [well not literally though, but figuratively]. And judging by sales I'd say people seem to like the Gameboy. It doesn't have 256MB of ram or a 3Ghz processor yet it still was able to captivate the gamers. Of course back then the CONTENT was more important than the cover. And if you think the waste of power is trivial
On my desk is a PPC 405 that takes about 80mW of juice to run at 384Mhz [the entire kit with 512M of flash, 64M of SDRAM, an FPGA runs off USB power]. It has the same computing power of roughly a pentium pro core [but with a higher clock rate] while taking vastly less power to run.
That's what we call "an improvement". Even the PPC 440 [which has as the documentation says two ALU pipes] only takes 710mW to run at 667Mhz. The VIA C3 at a similar clock rate is actually slower [in terms of MIPS] and takes 10 times the power. Don't even get me into the AMD and Intel camps.
Would this get you 1600x1200 @ 300fps? no. Not even close. Would it be fast enough to replace your 50W desktop processor? yes.
If you think "it must take a lot of power to be good and that's all there is about that" you're sadly mistaken.
Further look at things like the PS2. It doesn't even have a graphics processor like a typical PC. It's just a cell processor design. The entire kit runs off 70W of power. You can't even run a P4 processor on 70W!!!
But doesn't sound like a lot?
How many PCs and laptops are out there? say 100 million? Say the average CPU [over the entire set] takes 60W to run. Replace that with a 700mW PPC 440 and save 59.3W of juice PER BOX. multiply that by 100 million.
Where does it come from? Magic pixie fairies?
Let's talk about cost. The PPC 440 using IBMs 90um process is 6mm^2. The P4 is roughly 100mm^2. That means in volume the PPC is several ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE cheaper to produce. Want a laptop? Drop 200 dollars off the price. Oh wait, now your battery doesn't need to be as big [as a side bonus you don't need a cpu fan]. Drop another $50 off the price.
I guess you're one of those "coal is endless and I like burning money" types. I'm sorry to burst your bubble kid but if you look to nvidia or ATI as the "advancement of computing graphics technology" you're sadly mistaken. Either they realize they can't keep burning power or another startup will eat them up by providing more efficient cores.
Tom
The in-game 'benchmark' is misleading (Score:3, Interesting)
how to increase your FPS for free (ati) (Score:3, Interesting)
Running fear 1.02 on an msi x800 xl
first i ran with FEAR.exe:
1st run (fps):
* min 25
* avg 46
* max 93
* 0% below 25
* 44% between 25 and 40
* 56% above 40
2nd run (fps):
* min 26
* avg 46
* max 91
* 0% below 25
* 43% between 25 and 40
* 57% above 40
then i quit and ran anything.exe
1st run (fps):
* min 22
* avg 42
* max 103
* 1% below 25
* 44% between 25 and 40
* 55% above 40
2st run (fps):
* min 21
* avg 42
* max 111
* 3% below 25
* 37% between 25 and 40
* 60% above 40
not believing it i reverted back to fear.exe and it went back to the first lot of results.
I dont know whats going on, but the max framerate jumped up by 20 fps as well as the percent above 40fps. The min and avg values went down a little.