S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky

Publisher: Deep Silver

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky is the prequel to GSC Game World's sleeper hit S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl and was unfortunately released in a bizarrely unfinished state and it's taken some time for the game to reach the levels of stability that we expect from a game. However, with the new 1.5.07 patch, Clear Sky runs great and as you would expect it to.

Clear Sky uses a heavily tweaked version of the X-Ray engine, which debuted with Shadow of Chernobyl and was updated to support several new graphical effects using DirectX 10 (and later DirectX 10.1 through the 1.5.06 patch). The improvements include enhanced visual effects like 'God Rays', wet surfaces, volumetric light and smoke, depth of field blurring, and screen space ambient occlusion lighting as well as better textures.

We used a custom timedemo for our testing, which incorporates many of the advanced effects introduced with DirectX 10 – we also enabled DirectX 10.1 on the Radeons. However, due to the intensity of engine, we have set the in game details to "High" instead of "Maximum" and have left anti-aliasing disabled.




Between the Lynnfield and Core i7 systems there is very little difference, with only a slight edge in favour of the Core i7 setup with its two full x16 lanes, in terms of the minimum frame rate for multi-GPU and for SLI. Again, the two newer systems annihilate the older Core 2 Quad and P45 system with a single GPU - the average frame rate doesn't even match the minimum frame rates delivered by the Core i7 and Lynnfield systems! In CrossFire it gets a little better, and is within 10 to 15 per cent of the faster boards.

If you're into playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, Lynnfield will afford no tangible performance difference over Core i7.