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.





The BFG GTX 285 H20 doesn’t fare overly well in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky with the Radeon HD 4870 X2 much faster. The BFG struggles to run the game smoothly beyond 1,680 x 1,050 with no AA and 16x AF with a minimum of 29fps and an average of 38.7fps. The HD 4870 X2 is churning out a 36fps minimum and 55.5fps average meanwhile.

In fact, the BFG is so off the pace that Sapphire’s Radeon HD 4850 X2 is faster, with a minimum of 32fps and an average of 47.4fps at the same resolution. The card can be had for as little as $299.99 ex VAT (after the rebate), making the HD 4850 X2 2GB $200 cheaper than the BFG GTX 285 H20.