High Performance Gaming on a Budget: Athlon II vs. Phenom II vs. Q9550S

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

Prologue: S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Clear Sky became a brand new DX10 benchmark for us when GSC Game World released a prequel story expansion to the original Shadows of Chernobyl, last year. Both games have non-linear storylines which feature role-playing game elements. 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 about 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, although the DX10 version does.

We are using the stand-alone “official” benchmark by Clear Sky’s creators. 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 already incredible atmosphere. Unfortunately, DX10 comes with steep hardware requirements and this new game really needs multi-GPU to run at its maximum settings. We picked the most stressful test out of the four, “Sun shafts”. It brings the heaviest penalty due to its extreme use of shaders to create DX10/DX10.1 effects. We ran this benchmark fully maxed out in DX10.0 with “ultra” settings plus 4xAA, but did not apply edge-detect MSAA which chokes performance even further.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Clear Sky DX10 benchmark “Sun shafts” at 1920×1200, first with the HD 4870-X2:

Now at 1920×1200 resolution with the GTX 280:

And now with the HD 4870-X2 at 1680×1050:

Finally with the GTX 280 at 1680×1050:

This time, with our HD 4870-X2 we do not see a lot of difference anywhere.  Less than two frames per second separate the fastest CPU from the slowest one.  With the GTX 280, the difference climbs to slightly over 3 frames per second difference – and that is between the stocked-clocked 3.1 GHz Phenom II 550 X2 and the highly overclocked Q9550s at 4.0 GHz – and only in the maximum frame rate!  Practically there is no real difference gained with any CPU; the video card will make the most difference with Clear Sky’s performance.