S.T.A.L.K.E.R. APU Performance Test

Released : 2009
Genre : Action / Shooter / Atmosphere / 1st Person / RPG
Developer : GSC Game World
Publisher : GSC World Publishing

STALKER: Call of Pripyat will again tell players about the tragic explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986. A "Zone" was formed around the station - a place terribly polluted with radiation, surrounded on all sides by the armed forces of Ukraine. But this still does not stop stalkers who go to the Zone in search of artifacts and easy money. You have to take the role of government agent Alexander Degtyarev, who entered the Zone under the guise of a stalker, and uncover the mysterious disappearance of five military helicopters, fearing for your life at every turn.

In this subsection of our review, the main graphical aspects of this game are revealed. Particular attention is paid to the version of the graphics engine used, the version of the API used, graphics settings and the quality of the development of the main visual aspects.

STALKER: Call of Pripyat is supported by major Windows operating systems, including Windows XP/Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8/10. Other operating systems are currently not supported by developers and will not receive support. 

 

The priority and primary graphics API for STALKER: Call of Pripyat is  DirectX 9/11 .

The game is based on X-Ray technology, a game engine created by the Ukrainian computer game developer GSC Game World for the game STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. The engine was introduced to the public back in 2001. Initially, it was focused on DirectX 8, but subsequently refined many times to match its time. Thus, support for DirectX 9 appeared in it, and with the release of STALKER: Clear Sky, DirectX 10 was added. After the release of patch 1.5.07 for STALKER: Clear Sky, DirectX 10.1 support appeared in the game. In STALKER: Call of Pripyat, DirectX 11 support has been added to the engine.

The programmers Oles Shishkovtsov and Alexander Maksimchuk worked on the engine (they also worked at 4A Games on the Metro 2033 project based on the book of the same name by Dmitry Glukhovsky). The graphics engine, the core component of the "X-Ray" game engine, uses deferred lighting and shading technology to achieve high fidelity lighting rendering with high geometric scene complexity. High dynamic range floating point rendering is supported.

Initially, the engine was focused on DirectX 8, but subsequently it was refined many times to match its time. Thus, support for DirectX 9 appeared in it, and in the game STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, the user could select the version of the graphics API in the graphic options of the game. In the version of the X-Ray 1.5 engine that appeared in the 2008 game STALKER: Clear Sky, the developers abandoned DirectX 8 and added support for Direct3D 10. Patch 1.5.07 for this game added Direct3D 10.1 support to the engine.

On September 9, 2009, AMD-ATi Senior Marketing Manager Ian “Cabrtosr” McNaughton published an article on his blog called “DirectX 11 — What to expect!” In which he described the advantages and main features of Direct3D 11. In this article, he stated that STALKER: Call of Pripyat, along with BattleForge and Colin McRae: Dirt 2, will use DirectX 11. The lighting system is fully dynamic and per pixel. Soft shadows are supported and Screen Space Ambient Occlusion technology is used. Of the relief texturing technologies, Normal mapping and Parallax mapping are used. 

The difference between AMD and Intel solutions is almost imperceptible.

 

Testing at  high  quality settings 1920x1080

This time, as we see, Intel is just on top ...

Testing of the video memory consumed by the game was carried out by the  MSI Afterburner program. The results were taken on  Core i 7 5775C and AMD A10-7870K systems at 1920x1080  resolutions   with high quality settings.

Testing at high  memory GPU quality settings 

 

At a resolution of 1920x1080, the APU video memory consumption is 500  MB of video memory.

 Loading of processor cores  at high quality settings 1920x1080  % 

When using integrated graphics solutions, the game is capable of supporting up to 4 computational threads. The full game uses a little more than two cores.

 

The test was conducted on the base configurations Core i 7 5775C and AMD A10-7870K with 8 GB DDR3/4 2666 MGz pre-installed memory. The test of RAM on the entire system was carried out without running extraneous applications (browsers, etc.).

Testing system RAM consumption 

 

If you have a system with  a Core i 7 5775C, the game  consumes 2.3 gigabytes of RAM. With a system based on  AMD A10-7870K,  the RAM consumption of all RAM was 2.2 gigabytes.