When FEAR was released in 2005, the fastest GPU available was the GeForce 7800 GTX, which was not capable of running the game at several hundreds of frames per second. Looking at some 2005 era benchmarks of the FEAR Multiplayer demo, it is clear that this problem went unreported by Monolith / WB / Sierra QA due to the lack of sheer GPU power needed to produce frame rates high enough to experience this bug.
Skip forward a couple of generations of GPUs and suddenly players were getting well over 300 frames per second and began experiencing this bug.
When playing FEAR at high frame rates (especially 300+ fps), the movement of the user's avatar becomes sluggish in the game world. This buggy movement is comparable to a force attempting to pull their player character backwards and will result in jumping shorter distances and a sluggish navigation experience overall. Crosshair spread also can become abnormal at high frame rates and as such it is easier to aim at a lower frame rate.
While Quake-based games such as Call of Duty have commands to set a maximum allowed frame rate, FEAR has no such feature. Yes, vsync is an option to limit your frame rate by syncing it with the refresh rate of your monitor, but it is not an ideal solution as it introduces other issues such as input lag and will limit most players to 60 frames per second due to the majority of LCD panels being 60hz screens, which to many competitive gamers is unacceptable.
So how do we fix this problem? A program to limit the frame rate of DirectX 9, DirectX 8, and OpenGL games was discovered and spread among some FEAR players. I think it's about time this was made widely available to all FEAR players to enjoy the most fluent game experience as possible on their hardware.
Update: I have found an easier and more versatile program for limiting frame rates called DXTory. It also boasts an on-screen-display for showing the current frame rate, and is capable of filming videos of gameplay similar to FRAPS.
DXTORY
Dxtory allows you to limit your frame rate in the "Advanced" tab and checking "Limit Video FPS," entering the desired frame rate and pressing the "minimize" button at the bottom of the application window (not the one at the top). I personally use 100 fps but am told 85 is also a good setting.
Advantages: Retain ability to launch games directly from xfire instead of having to use another executable to launch the game, stores profiles for multiple games, ability to record game footage, can display frame rate on-screen. No complicated instructions needed!
FPS Limiter
This program will allow you to create a launcher file that will limit FEARMP.exe to 99 frames per second. It is then possible to get a constant 100fps by pressing F12 to raise the frame rate limit by one frame per second. This is covered in more detail in the instructions below.
Download it here.
Instructions
HappyStick has written some instructions on how to use the FPS limiter. They are included in a notepad file in the FPS limiter archive. They have been included in this post in case you would like to read them here.
This program is going to limit your FPS to 100 (ideal FPS for FEAR), so it gets rid of the abnormal crosshair spread/glitched jumping and movement.
Step 1 (Installing Java):
Make sure that you have Java installed on your computer, otherwise this will NOT work. You can get Java at: http://www.java.com/
Step 2 (Setting it up):
Extract FPS_Limiter.zip and double-click FPS_Limiter_GUI to open the program.
- Set the 'Choose' options to: D3D9
- Click on 'Search executable', browse to FEARMP.exe and double click on it.
- Set the maximum FPS to 99 (I will explain later why you shouldn't set it to 100.)
- Click on OSD, and then click on Create Bat.
Step 3 (In action):
Now double click the .bat file that was created (called FEARMP.exe.limited, you can find it in the same directory as the FPS_Limiter_GUI is in) to run the game with the FPS limiter running.
Bug and Workaround
There seems to be a bug however. When you set the maximum FPS to 100 and create the bat, it doesn't work. So currently it will be running at 99 FPS, instead of 100.
Press F12 once to increase the FPS from 99 to 100. Then click F10 to hide
the digits showing the FPS.
As the .bat is set to running FEAR at 99 FPS by default, you have to increase the FPS by 1 every time you start it. So every time you start up FEAR using this program, simply hit F12 once, then F10, and your FPS will be increased to 100 and the digits will disappear.
CONTROLS in-game:
- Ingame keys to change the desired fps (F11 decrease / F12 increase)
- Ingame fps display, show or hide with F10
We hope that this helps you play FEAR more smoothly and that you enjoy playing with better movement and are better able to control your aim.
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