Conclusion

S.TA.L.K.E.R. is a very demanding game graphically, but fortunately you can get good frame rates with the game with today’s latest mainstream graphics cards. You can find GeForce 7600 GS cards for right around $100 at many online retailers, while PriceGrabber listings for the Radeon X1300 XT start under $100. Unfortunately neither of these cards were quite able to hit what we’d consider playable frame rates with dynamic lighting enabled, but with a few more tweaks to our config file and a little bit of overclocking (the 7600 GS can typically hit 7600 GT speeds especially with better cooling) we think frame rates in the 30 fps range would have been possible, especially at 1280x1024.

If you can afford to spend $150, the Radeon X1950 GT is pretty hard to beat at that price point for S.TA.L.K.E.R. The X1950 GT isn’t quite as fast as its predecessor, the X1900 GT, but as we discussed in our Sapphire X1950 GT review, these cards are based on the exact same GPU used in the X1950 Pro, so it’s not hard to get more performance out of these chips with a little bit of overclocking. In the US Sapphire is the only board partner bringing the X1950 GT to market at this point, while in Europe and Asia Palit and TUL are the sole card manufacturers. NVIDIA’s GeForce 7900 GS also performs well, but at stock speeds it isn’t quite as fast as the Radeon X1950 GT. A factory overclocked 7900 GS card would no doubt fare better in S.TA.L.K.E.R.

Moving higher up the price bracket, the Radeon X1900 XT 256MB and GeForce 7900 GTO really stand out. Unfortunately neither one of these cards can be found either online or at retail very easily anymore, they’ve basically been replaced by the Radeon X1950 XT 256MB and the GeForce 7950 GT. We don’t have a Radeon X1950 XT 256MB for testing, but considering that the X1900 XT 256MB outperformed the GeForce 7950 GT, the X1950 XT 256MB should be the faster card. Of course, keep in mind that the GeForce 7950 GT we tested was running at stock speeds, and many of NVIDIA’s board partners have chosen to overclock their 7950 GT cards from the factory for enhanced performance, so it’s quite possible that one of these OC’ed 7950 GT boards could give the ATI card a run for its money.

Sitting alone at the very upper echelon of the mainstream graphics cards we tested is NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB. Clearly the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB is the fastest sub-$300 graphics card you can buy for S.TA.L.K.E.R. today; with the card delivering performance that was over 25% greater than the next closest competitor at 1600x1200. It really isn’t even close. Besides performance, the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB has other intangibles going for it such as its added AA modes and low noise. It really is a great card for the gamer on a strict sub-$300 budget.

Surprisingly enough, AA quality is pretty much a wash between the GeForce 7 and equivalent Radeon cards right now in S.TA.L.K.E.R. With their support for HDR+AA, we expected the Radeon X1K cards to have an obvious advantage here, but it looks like GSC isn’t enabling AA for anyone in HDR mode at this point. Considering that Unreal Engine 3 games with HDR like Rainbow Six: Vegas also lack support for HDR+AA, GSC isn’t alone here, but we’d like to see more game devs taking advantage of this feature, particularly since more powerful DX10 cards are becoming more readily available.

However one area where the Radeon cards still have the advantage over GeForce 7 is in AF quality. As we’ve noted in the past, the GeForce cards shimmer under the default “Quality” image quality mode set by NVIDIA. To reduce the shimmering, you’ll want to adjust the image quality setting to “High Quality”. This turns off the filtering optimizations which cause the texture shimmering. Fortunately though the shimmering isn’t that noticeable in most environments, it really only stands out on long, flat objects like roads. Therefore if you haven’t noticed it in the past, you probably won’t see it in S.TA.L.K.E.R. either.

So that does it for Part 1 of our S.TA.L.K.E.R. performance eval. In Part 2 we’ll be taking a look at high-end cards, and in Part 3 we’ll examine CPU performance. Supposedly S.TA.L.K.E.R. takes advantage of quad-core CPUs. We’ll be putting this to the test shortly!

If you’ve taken some cool screenshots within S.TA.L.K.E.R. you should definitely check out the FiringSquad S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl Screenshot Contest. The winner will receive a copy of Supreme Commander or Company of Heroes, courtesy of THQ! For more details, click here.