Kingston HyperX 2GB PC3-14400 Memory Kit with Intel XMP

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

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.

The game was benchmarked with full dynamic lighting and maximum quality settings at 1920×1200 resolution.

Crysis

Crysis is a science fiction first-person shooter computer game that was developed by Crytek, and published by Electronic Arts. It was released on November 15, 2007 in the United States. The game is based off the CryENGINE2 game engine, which is an extended version of CryENGINE, the game engine behind the hit game Far Cry a number of years ago. The full retail version of the game Crysis was used with patch 1.21 for benchmarking. FRAPS was used over the internal benchmark utility to help avoid driver enhancements. Legit Reviews has just NVIDIA data for this game as we just recently updated the game to version 1.21 and picked a new scene to run FRAPS on and didn’t have time to re-test all the cards in time for this article, but managed to get a number of the high end cards tested.

Benchmark Results:Both Crysis and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. showed improvement with increased memory frequency and tighter timings.