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.





While it might not be one of the most popular games we test graphics cards with, our S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky benchmarks are some of the most demanding we use. The GeForce GTX 295 and Radeon HD 4870 X2 are clearly very evenly matched here, with similar results for single card performance in all three tests, with the 4870 X2 just edging in front at the higher resolutions.

Looking to multi card however paints a different picture, and the Radeon HD 4870 X2 in CrossFire has a small but obvious advantage of SLI GeForce GTX 295s in all three tests.