S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky

Graphic Analysis

The original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was a very unusual game graphically and Clear Sky is no different. While the actual presentation of the game is pretty mediocre (and very brown), the graphical engine under it all is actually very, very powerful.

Clear Sky runs on a modified and updated version of the X-Ray engine, the same one used in Shadow of Chernobyl. It has to be said though that since the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was a mostly stable game, these modifications and updates are more than likely to be the root of all this buggy evilness.

It does have advantages though and let nobody say that Clear Sky doesn’t have more than a fair share of graphical pizazz. There’s depth of field, motion blur, dynamic sun rays and shadows which move realistically as the Sun moves through the sky.

Yes, we know that sounds like a simple and stupid thing to praise in this day and age, but it really is very impressive to watch the silhouettes and shadows of trees and nearby buildings shift across the face of the virtual earth.

Graphical Presets

Let’s plunge right in here and look at the graphical presets on offer in Clear Sky. These appear to be chosen automatically, though we still had to tweak them to get solid performance. Check the screenshots below.


Above you can see the lowest three of the graphical presets and we’re betting that like us, you can’t really find a difference between them. There seems to be some difference in the shadows admittedly, but that’s actually just because of the wind blowing in the screenshots.

In fact, the lighting and shadow effects seem to be controlled separately to the graphical presets in the Lighting setting, which we’ll look at later.

Furthermore, the textures seem to be only remotely affected too and the only difference we can see is if we compare the Minimum setting above with the Maximum setting below and look at the textures of the floorboards in the bottom left on the enlarged images. It’s a barely perceptible difference.


In all of the other presets however there is no perceptible difference, even after restarts between graphics changes – both deliberate and bug-caused. The lighting, the shadows, the texture resolution – all of these are the same. On a bit of a sidenote though, you do have to step back a bit here and see how funny it is to have one page full of identical pictures, with an entire page telling you that there's no difference between these pictures. C'est la vie.

The question is though; is this lack of change across the various settings the result of something deliberate done by the developers, a simple oversight, or caused by a graphics bug? None would surprise us, though we have no idea for ourselves.

On the next page we look at some of the more impressive graphical settings and how they do change based on the settings we give them.