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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. IQ settings wise this is what 98% of you will be using. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. does not support hardware antialiasing, yet uses a software applied method which is enabled.

We see the 320MB 8800 GTS taking the lead but the 2900 cards have plenty of horsepower left to make this a very enjoyable experience.

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 use FRAPS to measure the performance and by use of the game command prompt remove a nasty framerate cap. The results do not lie. You are looking at results measured at 4xAA and 16xAF.

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 HD 2900 Pro/XT handles BF2 really well. But again we see very good performance with the 8800 GTS 320MB. The Radeon 2900 card wins and loses here and there. The losses have a lot to do with ATI's AA methods.