WeвЂ™ve gone ahead and benchmarked the game during the вЂњdayвЂќ flyby, once with the DX11 feature set enabled, and once with it disabled. The benchmark comes with 4 different flybys, each under different environmental conditions: day, night, day with rain, and day with sun shafts.

Only contact hardening shadows are particularly noticeable in the benchmark tessellation and HDAO are there, but are virtually impossible to catch given the zoomed-out nature of the benchmark and the fact that itвЂ™s constantly in motion. Unfortunately a moving benchmark makes for a poor source to take screenshots, so weвЂ™re going to stick with AMDвЂ™s reference shots here. STALKER allows for contact hardening shadows with DX10.1 and DX11 mode. These shadows are referred to as contact hardening shadows, and the use of them in games has been limited by the expense of calculating them using the DX10 feature set. AMD loves to use a light pole as an example, as the top of the shadow should be softer than the bottom. With diffusion, the softness of a shadow increases with the distance of the casting object from the surface the shadow is being displayed on. Currently soft shadows are implemented with a fixed degree of softness around the entire shadow, which isnвЂ™t how shadows really work.

Newer games have since taken diffusion into account to generate soft shadows, but these shadows arenвЂ™t necessarily accurate. Stencil buffering was used to determine where a shadow would fall, and that was it.

The first real shadows, seen in such titles as Doom 3, had very hard edges. Shadowing has been on a path of particularly noticeable evolution. So today, letвЂ™s talk about contact hardening shadows. And weвЂ™ve covered tessellation in-depth in our look at DirectX 11. WeвЂ™ve already seen HDAO with Battleforge, and itвЂ™s no different here in STALKER. High Definition Ambient Occlusion using compute shaders.STALKER makes use of 3 major DX11 features. Since itвЂ™s an unplayable demo, weвЂ™re going to forgo any competitive benchmarking (itвЂ™s not as if anyone else has a DX11 card anyhow) but we will look quickly at the performance impact of these features, since this is the closest thing we have to a playable game using them at this point in time. However weвЂ™re told that these versions only had an early-stage implementation of the DX11 feature set, and that the demo is more representative of where the game is after patching and what it will be like when it finally launches in the rest of the world early next year. The Russian version actually shipped back in October, and the German version shipped 2 weeks ago. STALKER is another one of AMDвЂ™s big DX11 titles, as itвЂ™s technically the 2 nd DX11 title to launch and the first such title to implement most of the major DX11 features. STALKER: Call of Pripyat вЂ“ A Peak at More DX11ДЇor the 5970 launch, AMD sent over a special benchmark version of STALKER: Call of Pripyat, which has since then been made public at the GSC Game World STALKER website.

Stalker call of pripyat review youtube