Excited about the F.E.A.R demo on Friday?

I wonder if it is using stencil shadows or shadow maps (in the DST use of the term)? I'm asking because of the option to change shadow resolution.

 

Well put Hellbinder. I suspect those who do not like the game or find the graphics other then high quality do not have the horsepower to fully enjoy it. This game rocks, in all aspects. I will concede, one gets more for their money in terms of performance, with HL2 and quality settings. This should change with a nice future optimization with a driver release by ATI.

 

This might just be the first game I buy on release. Best AI to date!! Too bad it chugs on my friggin GTX+2.6Ghz A64

 

The AI is the best I've seen to date, the graphics are very, very nice, it's extremely cinematic with high production values, and the gameplay is fun. I'll be getting this on release, as well.

 

Awesome!

A must!

Very cool when you shoots walls.

 

I'm using 1024x768, details = high.

average 35 fps, overclocking my 9800pro to a 9800xt...

ok.

 

Have you tried to see what happens when the shadow resolution is set to low? I thought the game was purely stencil shadowing. The shadow resolution could be related only to the soft shadows option.

 

Would do but I've had no luck in trying to download the damn demo!

 

I know there's a bunch of links and mirrors for the demo out there and I had to try quite a few before I had any luck. I was recommended this FTP link, which was very stable and maxxed out my 2MB cable (240KB/s):

ftp://fear-demo:fear-demo@84.16.227.18/fear_spdemo_en.zip

Cheers,

BrynS

 

1) No support for 1280x1024 makes baby Jesus cry and want to smack the developers silly with a year 2005 calendar.

2) Performance is definitely not appropriate for the visuals. Yes, there's tons of shit flying around on the screen but it's just the classic case of quantity over quality ie. it doesn't make the game look good. What's the point then? Make combat annoying?

3) Gameplay is utterly bland and uninspired. It's kinda like Pariah that way - you just run and gun and that's it. It wasn't so bad though if at least the guns or the enemies were fun or in any way interesting. Sadly, they just aren't. Bullet time, been there, done that. It's nice to have because at least occasionally you get to almost see what's going on, but it doesn't save nothing.

4) Level design = room, corridor, room. Static environment with ZERO interactivity. Not even buttons or keycards or whatnot. I can't for the life of me see what they were thinking there.

 

Have you even ran it at playable settings? I mean you can't rightly expect anything to look good when the framerate is crap. Sure you may not have had to turn down things on previous games to make things run well; but with a constantly advancing platform like the PC, they put those options there for a reason.

The readme simply suggests favoring AA to resolutions above 1024x768 to insure good performance. Don't you find it funny that you are complaining about framerate while blatently ignoring the developers advice on peformance?

Expecting new games to never be more demanding than what your current computer can handle at particular resolution seems silly to me. My old thunderbird ran CS great back in the day, but a lot has changed since then.

There is always phase change cooling and SLI, that would probably get you running smooth at the native resolution of your monitor.
But seriously, that sounds like a nice computer. I can't see how it could be hard to make do with what you've got. I hear scaling works quite well on those Dells, seems like this would be a good situation to use it.

By the way, widescreen works great, you just have to edit the resolution settings in:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Monolith Productions\FEARSPDemo\ settings.cfg

 

Does anyone else feel real sorry for Fallguy? Poor chap, we should start a collection.

 

Huh? Yes I played with things turned down, and 1600x200 was "playable", with no AA. It looks horrible with no AA to me. A game can look good, and the framerate be bad. I know the options are there for a reason, and I know PC games can be demanding, especially new ones. That being said, the performace is crap. I upraded to 2gigs of ram just for BF2, because when options are set to high, it stuttered with 1gig. I dont mind upgrading to get the performance I want.

I didnt ignore anything. In fact, performance is worse, with AA and 1024x768, than at a higher res, and no AA. At least for me. So their advice doesnt make any sense to me. Tell me another game that tells its customers to play at 1024x768, on any current hardware. I cant think of any. Farcry, HL2, D3, any other graphically good looking, and new engines didnt do this, not even close.

Again, I never said I dont expect newer games to push current hardware. I upgrade for new games all the time. My X850XT/PE didnt get the frames I wanted in BF2, so I got a 7800GTX. 1gig wasnt enough, so I got 2. What I did say, is that it doesnt look good enough to me, to warrant the terrible frames. The game looks good, but not that good to me. But thats my opinion. Especially when the game is mostly dark, and not much action. In the MP beta, it was far worse, because o lots of action.

Ive already had a Mach II, and SLI. The extra CPU speed I could get with a Mach II again wouldnt help much, if at all.

Scaling still doesnt look very good, to me. Putting 1024x768 across a 24" screen would be horrible. What I did, is set the drivers to scaling, and set the game to 1600x1200. I had two black bars on the side of my monitor by doing this, but it was MUCH more playable than 1920x1200.

I know WS works, and I am very happy about that. I am going to try 1680x1050 instead of 1600x1200, because I really enjoy gaming in WS. 1680x1050 is more demanding that 1600x1200 in my limited testing, but Ill give it a go. And 1920x1200 is simply not playable, at all. Perhaps if I dropped everything to the lowest setting, but that would be silly to me.

To me, its the same as I felt when Halo shipped for the PC. It too got horrible performance, no matter what system you had. As Ive said before, I liked the short demo, and even the deathmatch beta. To me I just dont think the graphics, warrant the terrible frames. Im not the only person who isnt happy with the performance, most people dont like it on various forums. Firingsquad did a article with it, and 7800GTX's in SLI drop to 15 frames at 1280x1024x32 4xAA/8xAF, with 9% of the time, under 25 frames. Not how I enjoy playing FPS's. Perhaps the full version will be better, or maybe this is just how it is. Either way, Ill get the game.

 

Everyone keeps saying bad graphics? Are we even playing the same game?

Game looked MUCH better than Doom 3, Battlefield 2, Farcry, and almost as good as Half Life 2 to me. Meh, and I'm not even playing at the max settings right now.

Sure there's nothing "new" with the game, but its presentation is awesome. And the AI, good lord, the AI simply destorys everything out right now. Easily the best AI I have ever played against in a FPS game.

I get this feeling some of you are judging it purely on its performance and looks, and blindly (oh I crack myself up) skip its awesome AI, which IMO makes its "nothing new" features stand out MUCH better.

 

Oh man, this isn't fair! I spent hours downloading the demo, only for sound to not work in-game (worked during the Sierra logo)!

Grrrr.

 

I downloaded the demo (admittedly it only took 45 mins) despite having a Radeon 32MB SDR...

Has anyone got it working on a FX5600/5700? - wanna know if it's worth installing on bruv's system...

Jawed

 

Yeah that would be silly, mostly medium settings would probably get you playable at 1920x1200. Besides you can always create custom resolutions in your nvidia drivers, like 1600x1000 would be an obvious one for a 16:10 monitor, and would likely run a little better than 1600x1200.

 

I agree with everything except that I think it looks much better than HL2 as well. HL2 simply sucked ass in the shadows dept.

 

HL2 blows this away in art design and resolution, but it does have a nice shader and shadow system, though the shadows eat your gpu alive.

 

Fingers-crossed that R520 will shine here...

Jawed