S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is one of the newest additions to our testing lineup. It doesn't have an integrated benchmarking utility so again we have to use FRAPs. In this test we do not enable AA, as it would be too stressing for these cards. AF, though, is set at 16x. The test consists of a 26 second scene in which the character walks through a number of houses surrounded by rich vegetation.

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This test is by far one of the most stressing. We see nearly all cards suffer in terms of performance. At 1280x1024 the GeForce 8600 GTS cards have a minimum score between 18 and 21. Performance obviously gets worse moving to lower models. At 1600x1200, performance nearly completely collapses. This can be attributed to the small amount of memory.