Legit Video Card Reviews

NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 SLI Video Card Review w/ ASUS, EVGA & MSI

Manufacturer: NVIDIA
Product: GeForce GTS 450
Date: Sun, Sep 12, 2010 - 11:00 PM
Written By: Nathan Kirsch -
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S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

Stalker Call of Pripyat DX11 Performance Benchmark

The events of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat unfold shortly after the end of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl following the ending in which Strelok destroys the C-Consciousness. Having discovered the open path to the Zone's center, the government decides to stage a large-scale operation to take control of the Chernobyl nuclear plant.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat utilizes the XRAY 1.6 Engine, allowing advanced modern graphical features through the use of DirectX 11 to be fully integrated; one outstanding feature being the inclusion of real-time GPU tessellation. Regions and maps feature photo realistic scenes of the region it is made to represent. There is also extensive support for older versions of DirectX, meaning that Call of Pripyat is also compatible with older DirectX 8, 9, 10 and 10.1 graphics cards.

Stalker Call of Pripyat DX11 Performance Benchmark

The game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: CoP has no internal benchmarking tools built into the game engine, but they do have a standalone benchmark available that we used for our testing purposes. The screen capture above shows the main window of the benchmark with our settings. Notice we are running Enhanced Full Dynamic Lighting "DX11" as our renderer.

Stalker Call of Pripyat Advanced Image Quality Settings

Under the advanced settings we enabled tessellation and 4x MSAA. We didn't enable ambient occlusion as we wanted to use these test settings for mainstream cards down the road and these settings should be tough enough to stress any and all DX11 enabled video cards.

Stalker Call of Pripyat Advanced Image Quality Settings

Benchmark Results: The benchmark gives you results for four different lighting scenarios, and the easiest on graphics cards are the 'day' settings so we will start there. The EVGA GeForce GTS 450 FTW was 16.7% faster than the reference NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450, which is on par with what we have seen so far today. The SLI scaling in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat was able to give us a ~90% improvement at both of the resolutions we ran today.

Next Page - StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty


Review Index
Page 1 - GeForce GTS 450 Brings NVIDIA DX11 to $129
Page 2 - A Closer Look At The GeForce GTS450
Page 3 - ASUS, EVGA and MSI GTS 450 Video Cards
Page 4 - The New NVIDIA R260 Series Drivers
Page 5 - The Test System
Page 6 - Aliens vs. Predator
Page 7 - Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY
Page 8 - Just Cause 2
Page 9 - Metro 2033
Page 10 - S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat
Page 11 - StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty
Page 12 - 3DMark Vantage
Page 13 - Unigine 'Heaven' DX11
Page 14 - FurMark 1.8.2
Page 15 - Power Consumption
Page 16 - Temperature Testing
Page 17 - GeForce GTS 450 1GB Overclocking
Page 18 - Final Thoughts and Conclusions