ASUS EN9800GTX+ 512MB Dark Knight

When it comes to first-person shooters, post-apocalyptic adventures are a dime a dozen. But when S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was first released in the spring of 2007, it dared to be different. How? By basing the game off of a real-world tragedy, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which occurred way back in 1986 near the city of Prypiat in the Ukraine. Despite the disaster happening so long ago, people are still unable to live in the surrounding area, and will be unable to for at least another 150 years.

In addition to the games real-world ties, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. happened to be one of the grittiest, realistic (aside from the problematic AI) and expansive games we’ve seen on the PC in a while. Having the ability to roam as you like is a huge benefit and really helped make the game feel real. Clear Sky further delivers on what made the original so great, but at the same time, adds support for DX10.

It might be difficult to judge from the screenshot, but Clear Sky (like the original) is one of the most demanding games on the PC today, especially if you wish to play using DX10. To help push all of our GPUs to their breaking-point, we stick to that mode while using the “High” quality setting.

Continuing along with what we’ve seen so far, the performance scales with our expectations. The increases in the performance is still incredibly minor though, and neither of these three resolutions were remotely “fluid” with such high detail settings.

While most of our GPUs here could handle 2560×1600 at reasonable detail settings, neither of our GTX’s could manage it. You really shouldn’t expect anything higher than 1920×1200 with this particular GPU, unless you really want to lower all detail settings to levels that will cause the game to appear ugly – which tends to defeat the purpose of running a game at such a high resolution.