The Big GPU Shootout: Part I, Upgrade Now or Wait?

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. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. features a science fiction alternate reality theme where more nuclear disasters occur at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power plant which causes strange changes and distortions in the area surounding it. This game has a non-linear storyline and features role playing gameplay elements such as trading and allying with NPC factions. The background and some terminology of the game is borrowed from the Russian Sci-fi book Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsjy and the 1979 film Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky.

In S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the player assumes the identity of “The Marked One” – an amnesiac “Stalker” – an illegal artefact scavenger in “The Zone”. This is the location of an alternate reality story surrounding the Chernobyl Power Plant after another (fictitious) explosion. On July 11, 2007, GSC Game World announced a prequel which was released 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. 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 include moving the city of Pypiat into this area. This game features “a living breathing world” with highly developed NPC creature AI which presents many realistic behaviors, such as pack mentality that are observed 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. Up to a million polygons can be on-screen at any one time. The engine features HDR, parralex and normal mapping, widescreen support, 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-ailsing 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 encounter in game.

We start with 16×10 for Building and Short – the Charts are mistakenly labeled “Clear Sky”; they are for STALKER

Now Short 16×10:

Now we continue with 19×12 for Building and Short demos:

Even the older video cards do pretty good with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. although gameplay is noticeably smoother with HD4870 and GTX280, not to mention 4870×2.  We do see that the X-ray engine will also occasionally choke any card at times.

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