Page 20 - S.t.a.l.k.e.r. - Shadow of Chernobyl

Gaming: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl

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 disabled as this feature is really for next-gen graphics cards performance wise.

As stated we went for the in-game's maximum quality settings, yet with static lighting. This will give us a very good overall framerate. With all the upcoming high-performance DX10 graphics cards this year later. in the year we might switch to dynamic lighting though, which will crumble the overall framerate at the very least in half.  Judging from the Ultra result, that moment might be sooner than later.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. does not support hardware antialiasing. To get you an idea where the performance stands we include a wide range of GeForce Series 8 results in here.  Next week we'll have another R600 review, and I'll try to find some time to include 8800 640MB GTS results as well.

Vista performance shows a small decrease over XP; it's not huge, but expect up-to 5% performance loss. Not bad, really.

IQ settings wise this is what 98% of you will be using.

Screenshot of where we measure framerate, this is also our image quality setting.