How will S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Abuse Your Video Card?

Anusha · Mar 28, 2007

In the quest for the best eye candy, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. can really draw on your GPU; read the article and see why if your card is less than a GF6600, you're overdue for an upgrade.

Graphically S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s X-Ray game engine is quite impressive. According to the developer, up to a million polygons can be on-screen at any one time, and the game sports the latest eye candy effects, including HDR lighting, parallax and normal maps, 3.0 pixel/vertex shaders, per-pixel lighting and soft dynamic shadows. In fact, the game is so demanding that many card owners with DX9 cards like the GeForce 6800 and Radeon X800 have been forced to play the game in DirectX 8 mode. This is because the game’s dynamic lighting model performs so many calculations it can bring many DX9 cards to their knees: get to aggressive with the graphics settings, and you can bring a modern GPU like the GeForce 7900 or Radeon X1900 to a sluggish crawl.

Source: FiringSquad

MOST WANTED · Mar 28, 2007

Anusha · Mar 28, 2007

MOST WANTED said:

What's this dude?

Anusha · Mar 28, 2007

Did you notice how the Anti-aliasing has virtually zero impact on the performance?
Dynamic lighting cause a huge performance hit as well. On my PC, the framerates dropped to 18-20fps! I was like... wtf!!!