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

Although the game is not out yet, THQ gave Driver Heaven and some of our community the amazing opportunity of testing out the multiplayer beta of this upcoming title. The game is still a bit rough around the edges, but it already looks amazing and runs at decent speeds. Better be on the lookout for this one. AA was not enabled because it does not work with dynamic lighting.

Our S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was very synthetic, as we didn’t want other players and the netcode to interfere with the results. Because of that we did our tests on an empty map, benchmarking the performance in the different in-game weather conditions and lighting conditions. The numbers you have before you might seem a bit high (especially when compared to the numbers found in Part 1 of the article). This is because the only semi-consistent framerate we got was when the in-game conditions were close to a clear day sky. The rest of the benchmarks were completely across the board, which made any kind of analysis impossible. One thing that all the benchmarks had in common was the fact that both operating systems produced very similar results. So even though the above figures might indicate Vista is faster, those 3fps are hardly worth mentioning.