hey, could anyone tell me if there is any way possible to play FEAR on my pc............ive got a 64mb geforce 4 MX 420..and i know it sounds completely rediculous running fear on 64 ... THE THING IS........when i clik on the icon to play,,,,it tells me my graphics card isnt supported........is there any way to change this? :ff:
Get a new graphics card. They have a minimum system requirements for a reason. The MX is a generation behind the generation behind the previous generation of nVidia cards. Even if you did somehow hack the game, you'll get horrible performance not worth playing.
As Addis said, get a new video card. Asking the GeForce 4 MX (which is really a GeForce 2 MX with some bells and wistles) is like asking a 2-year old to move an anvil. You're asking video card technology that's at least 4-5 years old to push a modern game. The video card industry moves rather quickly, averaging a new product family about every 6 months. FEAR is a graphically intensive game that needs a powerful video card to play the game. Even if you tried Linux, the technology the video card uses is so old, you wouldn't be able to play it there either. The developers of FEAR knew what was needed to run the game, so they listed the minimum requirements, not minimum suggestions.
Yeah sorry man, but for what it's worth a friend of mine used to play HalfLife 2 on medium-high setting with a Geforce 4MX so it's surprising what that card can still do. But unfortunately FEAR happens to be a cut above and more or less rapes any modern PC so you may need a blow a couple hundred to get the desired results. I'd say go with something like the X800Pro, they're really cheap (for a high end card) these days and you can crank the settings pretty far up, provided you've got a gig of ram and a decent processor.
Even with high end cards, you still get pretty low fps, i have all settings on maximum, and i have a x800xt pe, and still, i go as low as 9fps!
Yeah the Pro would be good for FEAR, provided it's AGP. Weird thing is my friend has an X850Pro, 1Gb or value ram, and a 3200+ proc at stock speeds and he maxxed Call of Duty 2 and FEAR and I never say any slowdown. How does that make sense?
Well, graphically, the Source engine isn't a beast like a lot of others. I think Anandtech did some tests, and the GF4 MX's could still do a pretty nice job at a moderate resolution. Now, granted, the limitations of DirectX 7 didn't give you as pretty pictures as a DX9 card, but, that aside, it look at least like Half-Life 1 grapically. I can't see the same thing happening with Doom 3 or FEAR due to the engine designs.
Well it looked a lot better than halflife one fortunately but you're very right the source engine isn't quite so next gen now. Personally I only find it impressive when you max everything and even then there were quite a few dull and muddy textures at parts yet the physics and facial animations are still top notch. My friend also played Doom 3 with that card but it did not scale back well at all. He had to play it on low at 800x600 and no shadows and no bumpmapping! So needless to say it looked horrid, granted it was better than Doom 2 (thank god) but still looked more like a game from 2001 with poor textures and sparse detail. I find that FEAR is the only game I've ever played that actually looks really good on medium. Even call of Duty 2 looks pretty bland on that setting in my opinion. Of course you definately pay the price for FEARs looks though. I cranked it up to Maximum just for the heck of it and when you're in the car at the very beginning I was literally getting about 1/6th or a frame per second it was so horrible I almost beat in my monitor. High was working occasionally well and sometimes it worked out at around 2fps so medium was really the only way to go.
