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

We went for the games maximum quality settings, recently we also enabled 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.

You are good to go with these pretty insane image quality settings up-to 1920x1200, nice.

Gaming: War Front - Turning Point

For those who just cannot get enough of the Second World War, War Front: Turning Point offers enough spin on the traditional model to offer a very satisfying experience. Graphically, the game is great, and is configured to run on a myriad of systems with different specs. Higher-end PCs will be treated to a nice amount of eye candy, including detailed vehicles, great environments and excellent special and explosion effects.

Image Quality setting:

• 4x Anti Aliasing
• 16x anisotropic filtering

A game that has not been tweaked to death at driver level as it is very uncommon to benchmark; which is really why we include it. We enabled all possible in-game eye-candy and with 4xAA and 16xAF at 2560x1600; we can still play at ~50 FPS. The performance here is really good.