It's well-known that F.E.A.R. is a real system hog. Sure, it's one of the most technologically impressive action games yet released, but to really enjoy it with all the bells and whistles you need a hefty PC with lots of RAM and a beefy video card. It just so happens, that's what we have here. And boy, do you want a lot of RAM. With only 1GB of RAM in our system, gameplay was a bit choppy with frequent hard drive access. Upgrading to 2GB fixed this problem.

Performance is a bit of an issue, too. F.E.A.R. is one of our standard benchmark games. When we ran the built-in benchmark at 1280x960 with all the visual detail levels maxed out, but with no AA or AF enabled, we saw a whopping 30% drop in performance against a similarly configured Windows XP machine (though our average frame rate was still around 60fps). Enabling 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering only made the situation worse: the frame rate dropped from an average fps of 70 down to a pitiful 32! Clearly, some driver work or OS optimization needs to be done here - most of the other games we tested didn't exhibit a drop in performance this dramatic.

There appear to be two big problems, from our admittedly limited testing. The first is StarForce copy protection. Its reliance on a hidden Ring 0 driver causes a compatibility problem with Vista that prevents games using StarForce from loading - at least, that's the best explanation we can come up with for the errors we found. It's very disappointing that there hasn't been a fix for this so far. The driver requirements of Vista have been known for quite a long time, and both Microsoft and games publishers should have been pressuring StarForce for a proper Vista driver since at least last summer.