The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay is based on the movie franchise of the same name, and provides a wild mix of kick-ass action and intriguing game environments. This hybrid game is similar to what Half-Life brought to the table, as you take the role of escaped con Riddick, and fight your way through some exceptionally rendered game levels. The in-game detail levels are also an important consideration, as moving the Shader Model above 2.0 can turn the game into a slide show on older cards, and even at SM 2.0, the game can bring most hardware to its knees.
Chronicles of Riddick is another game benchmark that really pushes our graphics cards to the limit, even at standard detail settings, and should give us another good look at high-end graphics performance. The ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB puts in another very impressive showing and posts noticeably higher scores at both resolutions. The performance gaps are significant at this level, and the ATI card outpaces the GeForce 7900 GT 256MB by 10 fps at 1280x1024 and almost 9 fps at 1600x1200.
When Chronicles of Riddick is shifted to 4X anti-aliasing and 8X anisotropic filtering settings, the Radeon X1900 XT 512MB continues it performance reign, and posts the highest scores in the field.
F.E.A.R. is a new entrant to our game benchmark suite, and it features jaw-dropping graphics and a physics engine that can bring any system to its knees. It even includes a wide selection of System and Video settings, along with an in-game testing module to keep things 100% comparable between different graphics cards. In this case, as we are dealing with video card performance, so we have racked the computer and graphics settings to high (max only increases AF and AA) and then testing at different resolutions.
F.E.A.R. is potentially the most demanding game benchmark in our entire suite, and its overall design rewards both pure performance and an SM 2.0/3.0 feature set. It also shows off the Radeon X1900 XT architecture to best effect, and the overall framerates are significantly higher than the competition. The actual framerate advantage is impressive enough, but the 40%+ percentage increase from the GeForce 7900 GT 256MB to the Radeon X1900 XT 512MB is monumental.
The overall framerates drop back when the 4X AA and 8X AF details are enabled, but the Radeon X1900 XT 512MB continues to sit well in the lead, and is easily the class of the field in terms of F.E.A.R. benchmarking.
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