Date:
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Category:
GPU / Video Cards
Manufacturers:
AMD-ATI & NVIDIA
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky - Gameplay Perf and IQ

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky has arrived to give us our apocalyptic fix, and just maybe grind our video cards into dust in the process. We'll find out how AMD’s and NVIDIA's latest high-end GPUs handle this graphically demanding new game!

Introduction

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky was released by GSC Game World and Deep Silver on September 15, 2008, and is the prequel to 2007's S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. Being a prequel, it takes place sometime before Shadow of Chernobyl, and comprises a different cast of characters. The overriding theme of Clear Sky is the attempt to secure ground for scientific study and find a cause for the sudden "emissions" that are wreaking havoc all over the Zone and even gradually killing the main character named “Scar.”

The Game

Article Image

Strictly speaking, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky is a First Person Shooter, or FPS. But it is really much more than that. It incorporates common RPG elements such as inventory management, a large open world, defense statistics, and questing. But perhaps the most important gameplay feature is the faction wars system. There are several factions scattered throughout the Zone, such as the Clear Sky research group, the Bandits, Renegades, and the Military. Another important added feature in Clear Sky is the weapon upgrade system. With this system, you can not only upgrade your trusty weapons, you can also repair them when they become damaged.

X-Ray Engine 1.5

Graphically speaking, Clear Sky is not entirely new. The X-Ray engine that powered Shadow of Chernobyl has returned to give us Clear Sky, but with some added features. The game is still very scalable on low-end hardware, but has also been upgraded to scale with high-end hardware. Some of the new features include "Sun Rays" / “God Rays”, wet surfaces, volumetric light and smoke, depth of field blurring, and screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO) lighting. Two of the new features: volumetric smoke and wet surfaces require the use of the DirectX 10 API included with Windows Vista, and is supported by NVIDIA video cards since the GeForce 8800 series and AMD video cards since the Radeon HD 2000 series.

We will state right up front here that DirectX 10 does represent a clear and persistent improvement in the visual quality of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky if you have the horsepower to enable it. The trouble, which we will see later in this article, is that there are some serious performance issues with the DirectX 10 version of the game.

The Video Cards

For this evaluation of gameplay performance and image quality in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, we will be including four of the top-performing GPUs on the market today.

From NVIDIA we have a GeForce GTX 280 and a GeForce GTX 260 (original). And from AMD, we have a Radeon HD 4870 X2 and a Radeon HD 4870.