GPU Shoot-Out – Part II – Setting New Benches
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Shadows of Chernobyl is a first person shooter by GSC Game World, published in 2007. This game has a non-linear storyline and features role playing gameplay elements such as trading and allying with NPC factions. In S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the player assumes the identity of “The Marked One” – an amnesiac “Stalker” – an illegal artifact scavenger in “The Zone”. This is the location of an alternate reality story surrounding the Chernobyl Power Plant after another (fictitious) explosion. GSC Game World released a prequel story expansion on September 5, 2008 as “Prologue: S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Clear Sky” and will also eventually become a DX10 benchmark for us, later on. In case you didn’t know, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. stands for “Specially Trained in Artifact, Lifeform and Kinetics – Energy Retrieval”.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. takes place in an area called “The Zone”, which encompasses roughly 30 square kilometers and features a slice of Chernobyl extending south from Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant with geographical changes for artistic license. This game features “a living breathing world” with highly developed NPC creature AI which presents many realistic behaviors in non-scripted events. The game engine was designed so that animal behavior is calculated even if the player is in a different part of the world. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. uses the X-ray Engine, a DirectX8.1/9 Shader model 3.0 graphics engine featuring HDR, parralax and normal mapping, soft shadows, motion blur, weather effects and day-to-night cycles. As with other engines using deferred shading, the X-ray Engine does not support anti-alising with dynamic lighting enabled. However, a form of anti-aliasing can be enabled that uses a technique to blur the image to give an impression of anti-aliasing.
Our benchmarks for this DX9c game are timedemo runs called “short” and “building”. Their flaw would be that the maximum frame rates are a skewed way too high as the camera pans the sky. The maximums should mostly be disregarded although the minimums and averages are fairly representative of what you actually encounter in game. The charts are mistakenly labeled as “Clear Sky”; they are in fact, Shadows of Chernobyl.
We do see that the X-ray engine will also occasionally choke any card at times. Evidently, crossfireX-3 needs more work from the ATi Catalyst team. GTX280 sits in-between 4870 and 4870X2, performance-wise.
