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 has a reputation for taking advantage of any improvement in GPU speed, as well as being a game where ATI dominates. That dominance doesn't look like it's going anywhere any time soon, with the Radeon HD 4870 X2 easily beating the two Nvidia cards, regardless of resolution or AA setting, and it even delivers playable framerates at 2,560 x 1,600. That's 2-Nil to the HD 4870 X2 then.

The GeForce GTX 295 puts in a good showing, but is a good few FPS behind the Radeon in every test, and the single GPU GTX 285 shows it's limitations, delivering performance at 1,680 that the Radeon offers at 2,560 x 1,600!