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.






Nvidia GT200-based cards have typically struggled to match their ATI counterparts in the Dyslexic's nightmare that is S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky (the punctuation demands that you must spell 'stalker' when referring to the game, and it's far too easy to call the game 'stakler', whatever that is). Silly name aside, the GTX 275 does a great job of keeping the HD 4890 honest, roughly matching the Radeon for pace at every resolution bar 2,560 x 1,600.

For example, at 1,280 x 1,024 the HD 4890 has the higher average of 44.4fps rather than 43.8fps, but the GTX 275 has the higher minimum of 35fps rather than 31fps. At 1,680 x 1,050 the GTX 275 is slightly the faster of the two new cards with a minimum of 27fps and average of 35.3fps rather than the 25fps minimum and 35fps average of the HD 4890. Only at 2,560 x 1,600 does the HD 4890 pull out any kind of lead over the GTX 275 but you'd struggle to play the game on either card with these settings anyway.