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.




Unfortunately S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky proved to be a bit of a washout where at 1,280 x 1,024 0xAA 16xAF the XFX ATI Radeon HD 4770 512MB was only able to muster a minimum frame rate of 19fps. This was faster than the Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT 512MB,
XFX GeForce 9600 GSO XXX Edition 384MB and ATI Radeon HD 4830 512MB though but the Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 512MB was the only graphics card to provide just about playable framerates up to 1,920 x 1,200 0xAA 16xAF where it managed a 24fps minimum.

Clearly if S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky is on your games I play regularly list, the Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 512MB might be the better option as everything from the ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB downwards struggles.