S.T.A.L.K.E.R.Official websiteThe year is 2012. Six years passed since the time of the Second catastrophe to have made the April events of 1986 fade.
The game is set in the Chernobyl exclusion zone which turned from a destiny-breaker place into a threat to all mankind. The Zone is reluctant to open up its mysteries and needs to be forced to do it. It is a rare hero who can reach the very heart of the Zone onto find out what danger awaits him there.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is an open ended FPS shooter game with high resolution textures and open environment, dynamic day/night cycles and smart AI enemies. While this game has been several years in construction it can still offer enough eye-candy to properly stress the latest high-end video cards.
I've spend quite some time exploring the virtual environment of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant lately, the game is a very big resource hog and for my overclocked 7950GT I had to experience frame drops even on lower resolutions. Taking the older G80 GTS to 1600x1200 gave me even worse gameplay, this video card just is isn't made for this high resolution in S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the frame rate dropped lower then 30fps several times in our selected test scene.
Overclocking your one year old 8800GTS won't help you out here, most 8800 GTS come with 320MB and in our test scene more video card memory is mandatory in order to keep the engine running smoothly enough. At 13fps, the 8800 GTS is forced to lower resolutions, a sharp contrast with the other cards we've tested who all offered us comfortable gameplay at over 30fps minimum. Strangely enough, none of the competitors could take a significant lead here. Sure, the 8800 GT 512MB came out as fastest, but looking at the minimum frame rate you'll see that the 9600 GT is in fact just behind, on par with ATI's HD3870.
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The problem was that one of the standard overclocked cards became instable whenever being put through heavy 3D rendering tasks, downclocking it solved the problem so I guessed we got stuck up with a bugged card (remember the news regarding transient voltage fix on 9600GT's).
Now, nearly one week after launch date, there seems to be something sneaky going on with NV9600 series. NVIDIA has changed the ways clocks are being build up. Earlier, a 27MHz crystal was used, the clock frequency got multiplied and devided until you get the final clockspeed, 650MHz for example. With GeForce 9600GT the GPU core frequency is based on the PCIe speed, the downside here is that my system always is configured with a 110MHz PCIe clock, making the 9600GT used in our article extra overclocked by another 10%!
So... let me warn you here: the results obtained in our article are based on a system using 110MHz PCI-Express clock instead of 100MHz, this difference stands for a 10% overclock on the 9600GT core clock and will have its impact on total system performance.
This being said, we will fix our way of testing in upcoming articles. Those who are still puzzled, don't hesitate to ask around what I was trying to explain here above, but I insist you have a read at our source, thank you techPowerUp!