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 enabled.

Image Quality setting:

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

With this game we went for the game maximum quality settings, we enable everything possible, also dynamic lighting (as requested recently in our forums). S.T.A.L.K.E.R. does not support hardware anti-aliasing, yet uses a software applied method which is enabled.

Stalker then. We again spot really similar behavior.

But as you can see, our image quality settings have toll on the GPU, and it's starting to bottleneck at 1280x10124 already. Remember guys, I'm merely showing you the performance results just the way you would play the game, meaning with IQ settings like this.

Whoever stated that a 60 USD processor (X2 4850) wouldn't be sufficient for today's gaming ?

Flat out GPU limitation from here on.

And at 2560x1600 we have flat line performance, the CPUs can deliver data fast enough to the graphics card driver, yet the GPU can't keep up anymore.