GameSpot: As expected, this is a game that will tax the beefiest of PCs out there. To make things easier for you, F.E.A.R. will automatically detect your hardware and configure the video, audio, and gameplay settings to eek out the best performance on your system. You can still tweak the settings yourself, but keep in mind that you'll need an extremely high-end PC to run the game with all the graphical eye candy turned on. The minimum system requirements are a 1.7GHz CPU with 512MB of RAM and a 64MB video card (GeForce4Ti or Radeon 9000 or higher). However, the recommended system requirements are a 3GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, and a 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro or GeForce 6600 video card or higher.

IGN: The game as a whole looks darned gorgeous. With a 6800GT and a 3.0GHz P4 in this particular rig, the auto-detect performance settings cranked almost every bell and whistle to the max (minus soft shadowing, which is very demanding on even the latest cards). No antialiasing, but anisotropic filtering was set to 4x at 1024x768. The stress test has changed from an in-engine cinematic to a Unreal Tournament-style fly-through, and this rig average 39 frames per second. Not too shabby. So it does appear that the game is indeed been optimized since the demo was released. You will want a DX9 card, preferably no less than a Radeon 9700 Pro or GeForce 6600GT. The gunfire haze, smoke effects, heat shimmer, distortion effects and filters, slo-mo tracers, explosions, bumped-mapped textures, and reflections all look quite pretty. And every detail setting is explained in the options menus, which is a nice touch, instead of having to dig through a manual or Google it for something that's hopefully explained in English, and briefly. You shouldn't have much trouble getting FEAR to perform to your liking, since there's a very long list of options you can toggle or adjust to certain levels.