Shortly after another disaster in Chernobyl, the authorities surround the area with the Russian equivalent of the U.S. National Guard, and they begin to hear weird screams and rumblings coming from within. After a while though, most of them are returned to earlier posts. Curiosity gets the better of some people, so they sneak into the 30-kilometer area to do some good old-fashioned investigating. These people are called Stalkers, and they report back to the authorities with their findings.

The 3D engine shines in a few key areas, all crucial in shaping the game's atmosphere. It's got a huge draw distance, which leads to the palpable feeling that this is a big world. Lighting and shadowing are its other big strengths. For this benchmark we have the in-game settings at maximum (AA/AF enabled), Dynamic lighting was enabled.

Image Quality setting:

• In-game Software Anti Aliasing enabled
• 16x anisotropic filtering
• Dynamic lighting enabled

Stalker we set at maximum quality settings, we enable everything possible, also dynamic lighting. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. does not support hardware anti-aliasing, yet uses a software applied method which is enabled as well.

Again we see a massive performance increase in Stalker as well. Seriously it is just stunning to see how well Crossfire scales. That is a third more performance over the GeForce GTX 280.