Date:
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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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!

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Test Setup

We will be using an Intel Core 2 Quad Extreme QX9770 CPU on an ASUS Blitz Extreme motherboard, and 4GB of OCZ 3P-1600EB4GK DDR3.

While it might be a bit of “overkill,” we use the QX9770 overclocked quad-core processor at 3.6GHz in an attempt to keep from putting our evaluation into a position of being CPU limited. Obviously, we make every effort to not use CPU limited games for video card evaluations, but the 3.6GHz processor seems to put many peoples’ minds at ease when it comes to that subject.

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Comparison Setup

We are overclocking our CPU from 3.2GHz to 3.6GHz (11x333) so that we can reduce any CPU limitations.

We are using the latest officially available drivers from NVIDIA and ATI at the time of evaluation.

We also have Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista installed.

We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and “eye candy” graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home. Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing based om real gameplay as well.