Again here we saw the low driver overhead from ATI's drivers come into play, as the scores for the GeForce 8800 series cards were limited under the old setup. This is a place where buying a faster graphics card might not give you better performance, but when moving to the new Conroe Extreme platform, the scores are much different.

The scores at 1024x768 for the GeForce 8800GTX increased 61% over our previous AMD platform, and 30% at 1600x1200. The ATI Radeon X1950XTX got a 23% boost, but the extra 64 frames a second at 1024x768 and 63 frames at 1600x1200 on the new Intel based platform is amazing.

Even in F.E.A.R. at the lowest resolution we can see signs of CPU limitations. The difference between the two lowest settings at no AA and trilinear filtering once again shows that we need even faster CPUs to match the graphics horsepower that is still not being tapped.