New DX10 screenshots from Stalker: Clear Sky

PCGHx.com shows some fresh DX10-powered screenshots from Stalker: Clear Sky.

[kwicksandz]

i just bought the original last week! Very unique atmosphere so my interest is spiked but...... i have such a backlog of games to play, how am i ever gonna finish them all =(

[Leaderof Espada]

looks so great about this and so many other pc games that pc fans claim their eyes are telling them look so great, and i am talking specifically about crysis

[Leathersoup]

I don't understand what you were trying to say with that sentence.

[funkycoldmedina]

Awesome pictures. Too bad DX10 is Vista only. This game and Far Cry 2 will be very interesting. STALKER was a very good game after a second play through and several patches. I hope they fix the map function as it wasn't easy to use. PC requirement was a bit high for the first one. My GF 7800GT could barely handle it, but my GF 8800GT has no issues what so ever.

[Jonelo]

http://www.pcghx.com/aid,64...

"PCGH: Can you please describe in detail the visual differences between the DX 9 and DX 10 version of S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Clear Sky? In other words what are the visuals that can only be rendered with a Shader Model 4 card and that players without DX 10 hardware will miss? Can you supply us with a visual proof/new screenshots?

First of all, those effects are volumetric smoke and dynamic wet surfaces. Still you'll need DX10 class hardware to be able to see all new effects that were added to game at a reasonable frame rate and high resolution.

Smoke was introduced to add more density to our underground levels. It interacts with walls, boxes, trying to get everywhere. It envelopes NPC's walking through it.

Dynamic wet surfaces effect is used to make user believe that it's a real rain, which interacts with everything you can see. Water splashes on the ground, water streaming down the walls, boxes, tanks, everything, dry areas under the roofs. This technique is completely dynamic and it didn't need any level designer work at all.

There's one more nice visual feature, but we are still not sure when it will be released, so it's too tempting to let you guessing what it could be.

PCGH: Is the DX10 render path faster than the DX9 (Vista) or the DX9 (XP)? Do even you utilize DX 10 to enhance the performance?

Our DX9 renderer API usage is greatly optimized, so we didn't expect to get higher frame rates for DX10. Still DX10 API is less CPU-consuming, so you could experience speedup in scenes that are CPU-bound.

Stalker: Clear Sky - DX10
Stalker: Clear Sky - DX10
PCGH: Have you already tested how much of a performance hit the optics of DX 10 will incur? Will even players with a first gen DX 10 card like the 8800 GT (G 80, 320 MB Video RAM) or the HD 2900 XTbe able to play Clear Sky with all details and a decent resolution of at least 1.280x1.024? What hardware would you recommend?

We didn't make wide performance testing across the whole range of videocards yet, but it is definitely in our plans. However, I can give you some clues which I hope would be useful: 320 MB of memory is definitely not enough to play at maximum texture quality, however it seems, that 512 would be. 8800 GTS 640 could be enough to play with all options on, but not at maximum quality. For us maximum quality means using the latest hardware for the best"