The battle of the HTPC cards, Galaxy’s GT 520 vs. HD 6450 (GDDR5 vs. GDDR3)
S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Call of Pripyat is the third game in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. All of these 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., Call of Pripyat features “a living breathing world” with highly developed NPC creature AI.
Call of Pripyat is compatible with DirectX 8, 9, 10 and 10.1. It uses the X-ray 1.6 Engine with dX 11, one outstanding feature being the inclusion of real-time GPU tessellation. It also features a 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 and DX 11 versions do.
We are using the stand-alone “official” benchmark by Clear Sky’s creators. 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 and DX11 effects. We ran this benchmark fully maxed out in DX11 with “ultra” settings plus 4xAA, including applying edge-detect MSAA which chokes performance even further.
Here we present our “high” DX11 settings (SSAO is on) for S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Call of Pripyat DX11 benchmark with 1xAA at 1680×1050:
A slideshow results with our target cards and the HIS hD 6450 cannot run with these settings at all. So no we present our “minimum” DX11 settings (SSAO is of) for S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Call of Pripyat DX11 benchmark with 1xAA at 1280×720:
This game is still really hard on entry level and mid-range video cards playing on the DX11 pathway. The GT 520 is faster than the GDDR5 HD 6450 and the GT 220 cannot run the DX11 pathway at all. We would recommend dropping details further if you still want to play at 720p in DX11.