F.E.A.R. Performance Test
The built-in performance test for F.E.A.R. happens to be a great test of a graphic card’s abilities that anyone can repeat, making it an excellent scientific benchmark. I set the resolution to 1280 x 960 x 32 and pushed all of the Performance settings to their maximum before running the test. Here’s what it came back with:

FPS

• Minimum: 19
• Average: 34
• Maximum: 67

• 22% below 25 FPS
• 54% between 25 and 40 FPS
• 24% above 40 FPS

Again, a very good showing from the Fatal1ty as it powered through most of this demanding test without many problems. While the card did falter a bit in certain parts of the test – the benchmark returned about a quarter of the results below smooth-moving 25 FPS – it also returned a surprising 25 percent above 40 FPS.

Call of Juarez Benchmark
As a part of the US release of its DirectX 10 game Call of Juarez, Techland created the world’s first DirectX 10 benchmark. The 8 series of NVIDIA GPUs are the world’s first DirectX 10 video cards, but until very recently, there haven’t been DirectX 10 games (or repeatable DirectX 10 benchmarks) to test the cards’ upper capabilities, so this benchmark is a pretty exciting find. The benchmark has two mutually exclusive settings (multi-sampling and super-sampling) so I ran the test twice. For the first test, I set the resolution to 1280x1024, shadowmap size to 2048x2048, shadows quality to 3, super sampling off and multi-sampling on (x4) and came back with:

FPS

• Min: 1.7
• Max: 3.4
• Avg: 2.6

• Min: 1.2
• Max: 2.9
• Avg: 2.1

Clearly the Fatal1ty is not powerful enough to run Call of Juarez at anything close to the highest level of quality; I included the test results above for the sake of completeness, as smoother playback required lowering the quality settings significantly. However, I don’t see the poor results of this test as a particularly large black mark against the Fatal1ty; the DirectX technology behind the demo is still new and fairly undeveloped and the drivers may not yet be robust enough to efficiently render this demo.

Conclusions
Overall, the XFX GeForce 8600 GT Fatal1ty is a very good entry into the 8600 GT market and one that certainly gives excellent performance for the money. However, because the performance upgrades XFX built into the Fatal1ty raises the price of the card high enough to where it costs as much as the more powerful 8600 GTS. For this reason, unless you really need a completely silent video card, I can’t recommend the 8600 GT Fatal1ty until its price goes down.