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.






Things went back to the general trend in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky with the MSI GTX 285 HydroGen OC failing to pull significantly ahead of the stock GTX 285. At 1,280 x 1,024 0xAA 16xAF the MSI GTX 285 HydroGen OC enjoyed a slight lead with a minimum frame rate of 38fps while the stock card could only manage 35fps. This difference became less pronounced as we ramped up the resolution and at 2,560 x 1,600 0xAA 16xAF they performed almost identically. Unsurprisingly the HD 4870 X2 and both HD 4890 models proved to be more adept than the Nvidia cards in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky since it's developers have previously worked with ATI to optimise the game.