Benching the Benchmarks: STALKER – Clear Sky DX10.1 Benchmark

… The Clear Sky Benchmark

This is a very intensive benchmark and one that has made some non-game owners to wish they had the full expansion.  It takes approximately 12 minutes to run it all and there are 4 sub-tests that are detailed when you complete it:

1. Day
2. Night
3. Rain
4. Sun shafts

All of the tests offer decent repeatability and are usually quite close from run to run – although not identical.  From my own game play, this benchmark is fairly representative of what you will encounter in-game if you max out the settings as we did.  You are presented with a few choices.  We picked ‘Ultra’as our “preset” choice.

1. Minimum
2. Low
3. Default
4. High
5. Extreme
6. Ultra

For “Render” we picked the DX10 pathway – No. 5:

1. Static  Lighting
2. Objects Dynamic Lighting
3. Full Lighting
4. Enhanced Full Lighting
5. Enhanced Full Dynamic Lighting (DX10.0)

You have a plethoria of resolutions to choose from.  We chose three which are most common among gamers with current modern PCs:

1. 1920×1200
2. 1680×1050
3. 1440×990

Finally, there are Advanced Options which offer:

MSAA; we chose 4x.

1. Off
2. 2x
3. 4x

MSAA for A-Tested Objects; and we tested both

1. Off
2. Dx10 Syle (Standard)

A final DX10.1 checkbox option is for ATi cards only which brings up the highest options, which we also benchmarked.  This last option is grayed out for Nvidia cards.

1. Use DX10.

Here is full disclosure of our testing setup:

Test Configuration

Test Configuration – Hardware

* Intel Core 2 Duo E8600 (reference 3.33 GHz; overclocked to 3.99Ghz ).
* ASUS P5e-Deluxe (Intel X48 chipset, latest BIOS. PCIe 2.0 specification; crossfire 16x+16x).
* 4 GB DDR2-PC8500 RAM (2×2 GB, dual-channel).
* Nvidia GeForce GTX280 (1GB, nVidia reference clocks) by BFGTech
* ATi Radeon 4870 (1GB, reference clocks) by ASUS
* ATi Radeon 4870X2 (2 GB, reference clocks) by VisionTek
* On-board Audio – ASUS P5e daughter-card – SupremeFX-II
* 2 – Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 Hard Drives [setup identically, except for the graphics cards]

Test Configuration – Software

* ATi Catalyst 8.12, highest quality mip-mapping set in the driver; Catalyst AI set to “advanced”
* nVidia Geforce 180.48, high quality driver setting, all optimizations off, LOD clamp enabled.
* Windows Vista 32-bit SP1; very latest updates
* DirectX November 2008; or as included with the Clear Sky benchmark.
* Clear Sky patched to 1.07.

Test Configuration – Settings

* as noted, vsync off in the driver to “application decide” and never in game.
* 4xAA enabled in-game; all settings at maximum – “Ultra”
* All results show average, minimum and maximum frame rates
* Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games.
* Vista32, under DX10/10.1 render paths