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.






The only resolution that the Lightning managed a playable frame rate in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky was 1,280 x 1,024 and even then its 30fps minimum was beaten by all the other cards on test. While the Lightning's average frame rates where good as we pushed the resolution up, it still couldn't hit a smooth minimum frame rate of above 25fps so slowdown was still noticeable regardless of decent average. The high averages are likely to be because of the enormous amount of memory the Lightning is endowed with. Raising the resolution from 1,920 x 1,200 to 2,560 x 1,600 for example, didn't effect the average frame rate whatsoever while the minimum took a hefty hit.