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 for the time being.





History dictates that Clear Sky favours the Radeons , but the GeForce GTS 250 throws that theory out of the water – it’s massively faster than anything else we’ve tested here and it impressively delivers a playable frame rate right the way up to 1,920 x 1,200. Both the 4850 and 4770 are left in the dust, only managing barely playable frame rates at 1,280 x 1,024. In order to enjoy the game at 1,680 x 1,050 on these cards, you’re going to have to lower some of the in-game details and potentially turn off dynamic lighting in order to boost the frame rate by a significant enough amount.