GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD7 Motherboard Review

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat DirectX 11 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.

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.

In order to give our XFX Radeon HD 6950 a workout on our systems we cranked the image quality preset to Ultra.

We also ran the Multisample Anti-Aliasing at 4x and Tessellation is enabled.

Benchmark Results: The GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7 was able to edge out the ASUS Crosshair V Formula in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat. Running the stand alone benchmark at the resolution of 1280×1024 the GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7 was able to average 102.8 frames per second while the ASUS Crosshair V Formula averaged 101.7 frames per second. This is a difference of only 1.1%. Increasing the resolution of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat to 1920×1080 the GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7 manages to hold onto a lead, though only barely. The GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7 was able to average 73.2 frames per second while the Crosshair V Formula averaged 73 frames per second. The difference at 1920×1080 is smaller yet, only .3%.