Stalker: Clear Sky - Impressions at 3.360 x 2.100 with 32:1 AF

If the headline vexes you: It is appropriate. In the "predecessor” Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl you might have noticed a flickering tendency. The flora, consisting of trees and bushes, were visualized with transparent textures (so called Alpha-Tests) - Clear Sky does the same thing. But textures aren't affected by normal Multisampling Anti Aliasing. Therefore it is possible that capillary ramifications, especially those with a size smaller than a display pixel, start flickering. The only possible way to get rid of those artifacts is Over- respectively Supersampling (-FSAA).

Clear Sky: Impressions of the Zone
Those screenshots were made with a Geforce 8800 GTX on Windows XP x86. So they represent the best available DX9 visualizations. On Windows Vista/DirectX 10 more options are available - we will deliver benchmarks and additional screenshots soon.

To finally explain the headline: The screenshots were made with 4x Supersampling-FSAA. This forces the GPU to calculate each display axis with twice the resolution - the scene is four times oversampled and downsampled afterwards. Thus vegetation, additional textures, shaders and natural polygon edges are smoothed. The texture effect matches 2:1 AF and that has to be multiplied with the normal 16:1 AF: This means 32:1 is in effect.



Please pay attention to who noticeably the branches are buffed by the Oversampling. With FSAA the game sometimes almost reaches photorealism. But this is bought dearly: More than 2 fps (in words: two) have not been possible on the Geforce 8800 GTX. Without FSAA/AF the game is running with 20 to 30 fps at 1,680 x 1,050 pixels. This requires, regardless of the Day-One-Patch, some optimization.

All the pictures can be found in the gallery. Warning: With about 3 MiByte each, they are quite big.