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.






S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky is one of the most demanding benchmarks we run, with the engine so hardware hungry that even the slightest improvement in clock speed can be seen in the results. No surprise then that the Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 1GB Atomic with its 20 per cent core and eight per cent memory overclock offers serious improvements over the stock HD 4890.

Once again surpasses the performance of Nvidia's fastest single GPU card, the GTX 285 at lower resolutions. Minimum frame rates are improved by as much as 19 per cent at 1,680 x 1,050 and 1,920 x 1,200 and average frame rates improve by between 13 and 15 per cent, regardless of resolution, making the Atomic the fastest single GPU card in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. by a significant margin.