“Quad Core vs Dual Core” Shootout: Intel’s Q9550s vs. E8600, Part Two

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

This is the first time we are running Prologue: S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Clear Sky. The original Shadows of Chernobyl was our benchmark. Our “Shootout Series” aim is to present the latest games and DX10 benchmarks, whenever possible. So when GSC Game World released a prequel story expansion last year as  Clear Sky, it naturally become a brand new DX10 benchmark for us. Both games have a non-linear storyline and they feature role-playing gameplay elements such as trading and allying with NPC factions. In both games the player assumes the identity of a S.T.A.L.K.E.R.; an illegal artifact scavenger in “The Zone” which encompasses roughly 30 square kilometers. It is the location of an alternate reality story surrounding the Chernobyl Power Plant after another (fictitious) explosion.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. & Clear Sky feature “a living breathing world” with highly developed NPC creature AI.  S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Clear Sky uses the X-ray Engine – a DirectX8.1/9/DX10/10.1 Shader model 3.0 & 4.0 graphics engine featuring HDR, parallax and normal mapping, soft shadows, motion blur, weather effects and day-to-night cycles. As with other engines using deferred shading, the original DX9c X-ray Engine does not support anti-aliasing with dynamic lighting enabled. However, the DX10 version does. We set all the graphical options – including anti-ailising – to their maximum values.

Our new 12 minute, stand-alone “official” benchmark by Clear Sky’s creators is far much more detailed and way better than the one we were using previously.  As an expansion to the original game, Clear Sky is top-notch and worthy to be S.T.A.L.K.E.R’s successor with even more awesome DX10 effects which help to create and enhance their game’s incredible atmosphere.  But DX10 comes with a steep HW requirement and this new benchmark really needs multi-GPU to run at its maximum settings – even below 1650×1080!  We pick two of the most stressful tests out of the four that are run and detailed by the official benchmark.  “Day” is the first, “night” and “rain” are less demanding but “sun shafts” approximating a bright sunny morning probably brings the heaviest penalty due to its extreme use of shaders to create DX10 and even DX10.1 effects.  We ran both cards fully maxed out in DX10.0 with “ultra” settings but did not apply edge detect MSAA which kills performance even further.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Clear Sky DX10 benchmark “Day” at 1920×1200:

S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Clear Sky DX10 benchmark “Sun shafts” at 1920×1200:

S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Clear Sky DX10 benchmark “Day” at 1650×1080

S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Clear Sky DX10 benchmark “Sun shafts” at 1650×1080

Another surprise … an engine that takes advantage of multi-core CPU does not give a big practical advantage over Core 2 Duo; in fact E8600 at 4.25 Ghz scores about the same as its 3.99 Ghz Core 2 Quad counterpart except in a couple of instances where they trade blows and Q9550S wins.  We do see CPU scaling clearly, however.