ATI HD 4890 1GB CrossFire - AMD Phenom II 955 BE vs Intel Core i7 920

Page 5 - Performance: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky

We all waited for years the release of now emblematic action S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl. The game had stunning for its day graphics. But now its continuation - Clear Sky, could not do anything but to improve on its predecessor. The games uses the so called X-Ray engine, and in Clear Sky it is at version 1.5, with DirectX 10 support (and a little later, thanks to a patch - DirectX 10.1 too). And so for the review we used the benchmark especially made by GSC (the game developers). In it there are 4 different scenes, including different effects, the scenes are called: Day, Night, Rain and SunShafts, giving a pretty good idea of what's the accent in any of them. The graphics below are sorted by the average frames between all tests, but to make things more interesting we showed the amount of frames generated in each scene.

We noticed the following here - the higher frequency of Phenom II 955 BE does give it an edge on Core i7 920 in the heavier mode (1920x1200 Ultra Detail, 4xMSAA), but under more relaxed settings (High, 2xAA) Core i7 920 takes the lead. In any event the results in both cases are rather low, and in the ones with a single card - that's right, there is no mistake, in some of the tests, results were identical for both platforms, to the first digit after the decimal separator even.