Big GPU Shootout – Revisited

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:

And at 1680×1050:

Finally at 1440×900

Here we see something really strange where the 9800 GT beats the GTS 250 by 1.5 FPS in the averages at 1680×1050.  It appears that this may be one of the times that the GTS 250 is limited by having only 512 MB of video RAM, compared with the 9800 GT’s 1 GB vRAM, as it does not show up at 1440×900 resolution; or it could be a driver issue.

Again we see the HD 4890 beating the HD 4870 and well ahead of the midrange and last generation’s video cards. TriFire takes off on the maximums and averages but chokes a bit on the minimums to lose overall to HD 4890 CrossFire. However, even the HD 4870-X2 cannot climb out of the teens for the minimum frame rates and the single GPU video cards are held to single digits. We also note that our HD 4890 and HD 4870-X2 suffered a couple of noticeable minuses with Catalyst 9-5 compared to the earlier drivers while our HD 4890 appeared to gain performance, but it was not as significant as in Far Cry 2.