F.E.A.R. is a fairly new title utilising plenty of DirectX9 functionality with a material rendering system produced via HLSL shaders. The lighting model employed uses a per pixel Blinn-Phong rendering model, capable of passes for emissive glow effects, multiple lights with shadows and translucencies. This is a fairly intensive title which should stress these reasonably well.

F.E.A.R. is another title that is quite shader limited, hence the performance gains for the X1900 XTX over the X1800 XT are around 28% at high resolution; in comparison to the previous generation X850 the performance differences rise to 70%. Here the X1900 XTX is able to display an average rendering performance well above 60 FPS at 1600x1200. Its somewhat of a curiosity that the X1900 XT board is rendering at about the same performance at the XTX in this instance.

The Crossfire gains have usually been a little limited in this title, even single boards are not limited by the CPU, which we suspect is due to some off-screen buffer information needing to be passed between the two boards via the PCI Express interface. That said, though, the X1900 Crossfire is offering a 44% performance increase over a single XTX board, resulting in an average rendering performance a little shy of 100 FPS at 1600x1200.

With 4x FSAA and 8x AF enabled the performance increase the X1900 XTX has over the X1800 XT stays about the same as normal rendering, at about 28% at high resolution. In this instance we see that the X1900 XTX over double the rendering performance of the X850 XT PE. The Crossfire gains are a little minimised here, standing at 30% for the X1800 Crossfire over a single X1900 XTX.

With 6x FSAA and 16x AF enabled the performance of the test is a little more limited by bandwidth and texture performance, hence it minimises X1900 XTX's main advantages over X1800 XT a little, so that now the maximum performance difference between them is 21%. In this case the X1900 is approaching three times the performance of the X850 XT PE, which not just a factor of the bandwidth differences between the two (as the bandwidth difference is much smaller than this) but because of the optimisations ATI have put into FSAA rendering on the X1000 series, and probably due to the shader dispatch processor being better able to handle the scheduling under high bandwidth loads.