Legit Video Card Reviews

ATI Radeon HD 4850 Versus NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+

Manufacturer: AMD
Product: Radeon HD 4850 versus the GeForce 9800 GTX+
Date: Thu, Jun 19, 2008 - 12:00 AM
Written By: Nathan Kirsch -
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S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Benchmark

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl uses the 'X-ray Engine' to power the graphics. It is a DirectX 8/9 Shader Model 3.0 graphics engine. Up to a million polygons can be on-screen at any one time, which makes it one of the more impressive engines on the market today. The engine features HDR rendering, parallax and normal mapping, soft shadows, widescreen support, weather effects and day/night cycles. As with other engines that utilize deferred shading (such as Unreal Engine 3 and CryENGINE2), the X-ray Engine does not support anti-aliasing with dynamic lighting enabled. However, a "fake" form of anti-aliasing can be enabled with the static lighting option; this format utilizes a technique to blur the image to give the false impression of anti-aliasing. The game takes place in a thirty square kilometer area, and both the outside and inside of this area is rendered to the same amount of detail.


S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Benchmark Settings

The game was benchmarked with full dynamic lighting and maximum quality settings at 1920x1200 and 1280x1024 resolutions.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Benchmark Performance

Benchmark Results: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl was and still is a fun game to play now that the developer fixed many of the bugs found in the game through a series of patches. The $229 GeForce 9800 GTX+ made short work of the benchmark with the image quality settings maxed out.  The $199 Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 also did fairly well on this benchmark.

Next Page - BioShock


Review Index
Page 1 - Battle For Mainstream Market Share
Page 2 - The ATI Radeon HD 4850 Graphics Card
Page 3 - The GeForce 9800 GTX+ Video Card
Page 4 - The Test System
Page 5 - Tomb Raider: Anniversary
Page 6 - Company of Heroes
Page 7 - World in Conflict
Page 8 - S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
Page 9 - BioShock
Page 10 - Crysis
Page 11 - Call of Duty 4
Page 12 - Lightsmark 2007
Page 13 - 3DMark 2006
Page 14 - 3DMark Vantage
Page 15 - Temperatures
Page 16 - Overclocking
Page 17 - Power Consumption and Final Thoughts