Benching the Benchmarks: STALKER – Clear Sky DX10.1 Benchmark
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky
– We Bench the Official Benchmark
S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Shadows of Chernobyl is a popular first person shooter by GSC Game World, published in 2007. It features a non-linear storyline with 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 an amnesiac “Stalker” – an illegal artifact scavenger in “The Zone”. This is also the location for Clear Sky – an earlier alternate reality story surrounding the Chernobyl Power Plant. GSC released this prequel story expansion on September 5, 2008 as “Prologue: S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Clear Sky” and it has just now become a DX10 benchmark for us. In case you didn’t know, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. stands for “Specially Trained in Artifact, Lifeform and Kinetics – Energy Retrieval”. Clear Sky follows the typical video game introduction also seen in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. The player’s character, Scar, is the sole survivor of a research party after an unknown emission has discharged from the center of the Zone. Nursed back to health in the Clear Sky Stalker camp, he is told that the continuing emissions are disrupting the entire equilibrium of the Zone that will lead to a event even more catastrophic than the original or subsequent Chernobyl meltdowns and explosions. With the introduction over, you start on a quest to discover the source of the emissions and imbalance to save yourself and our biosphere.
Clear Sky also takes place in a surreal area called “The Zone”, which encompasses roughly 30 square kilometers. The original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. uses the X-ray Engine, a DirectX8.1/9 Shader model 3.0 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 DX9 X-ray Engine does not support anti-aliasing with dynamic lighting enabled. Clear Sky has added DX10 extensions to the X-Ray Engine that adds real AA; and the DX10 lighting and shadowing effects are really well done – especially in comparison to early DX10 games like Lost Planet and Call of Juarez. However, there are still short unexplained slowdowns that will usually drop your frame rates into the teens as DX10 is much heavier on your graphics card than the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
(all of our screen shots are posted at 1920×1200)
STALKER - DX9c
Clear Sky - DX10
Clear Sky Official Benchmark
We got a very pleasant surprise at the end of last year, last week:
http://cs.stalker-game.com/en/?page=news&item=119
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky benchmark
30 December 2008“Dear players, hardware specialists, overclockers, modders and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fans! We are happy to present you a special version of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky designed for testing the performance of your PC!
This benchmark is based on one of the ingame locations – Marshland. The testing process includes four stages, those utilizing various weather and time of the day settings (day, night, rain, bright sun). In order to test your system thoroughly the benchmark is provided with a number of presets and options including different versions of DirectX (9.0, 10.0, 10.1), screen resolutions, antialiasing etc, all at your disposal.
Having your PC tested with S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky benchmark you will be able to get detailed information about its performance on various graphical modes and find out how well your system is balanced for gaming and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky in particular.
Well, we love STALKER and CS – this editor cut his reading teeth, as it were, in elementary school – on Russian Science fiction on which the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series is based – so I jumped right into the benchmark.
For our benchmarking, patch 1.07 was used; it was first to add DX10.1 support to Clear Sky – and today – date of publication, patch 1.08 is released.
http://cs.stalker-game.com/en/?page=patches
Changes:
– Added the possibility for admins to take screenshots of a player’s screen (as an anti-wallhack-cheats measure) by console commands (make_screenshot, screenshot_all).
– Fixed bug with banning the players.
– Fixed bug with saving the rank and money amount of the player upon the round restart (if the player deliberately closed the game process in the task manager, and then reconnected).
– Increased the stability of the network play.Fortunately, 1.08 all appears to be multi-player related, so we present our findings which are still valid and up-to-date with with you can expect from Clear Sky bench.
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Thank You !!! Finally a useful and easy to understand article. Keep up the very good work…. will be following your articles into the future way into the future. HIGHWON
Stalker Clear Sky is the game of the year for 2008 for me. I absolutely loved it.