Vista 32 vs. Vista 64 shootout – PC Gaming

by apoppin · May 13, 2009

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

Prologue: S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Clear Sky naturally became a brand new DX10 benchmark for us when GSC Game World released a prequel story expansion to the original Shadows of Chernobyl, our previous DX9c benchmark. Both games have non-linear storylines which feature role-playing gameplay 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 roughly 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. However, the DX10 version does.

We are using the 12 minute, stand-alone “official” benchmark by Clear Sky’s creators. As an expansion to the original game, 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 incredible atmosphere. Unfortunately, DX10 comes with steep HW requirements and this new game really needs multi-GPU to run at its maximum settings – even below 1650×1080! We picked the most stressful test out of the four that are run by the benchmark. “Sun shafts” approximating a bright sunny morning, brings the heaviest penalty due to its extreme use of shaders to create DX10 and even DX10.1 effects. We ran this benchmark fully maxed out in DX10.0 with “ultra” settings 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:

Here are Clear Sky benchmarks now at 1680×1050.

Another surprise! An engine that takes advantage of multi-core CPU still does not give a big practical advantage with 64-bit over running on the 32-bit pathway! In fact, we only see Vista 64 just occasionally edge out the frame rates on the 32-bit pathway and it even flip-flops with 4870-X2.