Page 12 - Stalker & Battlefield 2

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 results, that moment might be sooner than later.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. does not support hardware antialiasing. To give you an idea where the performance stands, we include a wide range of GeForce Series 8 results in here.  

The single card is showing off good performance, yet look at Crossfire fly. That's stunning performance.

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.

Gaming: Battlefield 2 - EA

The award-winning Battlefield franchise invades the high tech frontlines of modern warfare in the new sequel, Battlefield 2. The game brings the intensity and excitement of Battlefield 1942 into the modern era with enhanced team play and the latest, most technologically advanced vehicles and weapons systems available to man.

I just love what this game can do in terms of gameplay and image quality. We had to use FRAPS to measure the performance and by use of the game command prompt remove a nasty framerate cap. The results do not lie.

Small note: the game by itself does not support these high resolutions, but simply make a little .bat file and insert the following, save this .bat file in the BF2 game directory and startup at the resolution of your choice:

bf2 +menu 1 +szx 2560 +szy 1600 +fullscreen 1

As you can see the Jetway Radeon HD 2900 XT handles BF2 quite well. But again we see slightly slower performance compared to the 8800 GTS 640 MB. This is what I told you at the beginning of our benchmark session. The Radeon card wins and loses here and there. What's very tough to comprehend is that the X1950 XTX is faster, but likely again due to the AA issue that AMD is trying to fix.

Crossfire again is showing off really excellent numbers yet can't keep up with a single GeForce 8800 Ultra.