S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
We tested S.T.A.L.K.E.R. by manually playing through a specific point in the game five times while recording frame rates using the FRAPS utility. Each gameplay sequence lasted 60 seconds. This method has the advantage of simulating real gameplay quite closely, but it comes at the expense of precise repeatability. We believe five sample sessions are sufficient to get reasonably consistent and trustworthy results. In addition to average frame rates, we've included the low frames rates, because those tend to reflect the user experience in performance-critical situations. In order to diminish the effect of outliers, we've reported the median of the five low frame rates we encountered.

For this test, we set the game to its "maximum" quality settings at 2560x1600 resolution. Unfortunately, the game crashed on both GeForce and Radeon cards when we set it to use dynamic lighting, so we had to stick with its static lighting option. Nevertheless, this is a good-looking game some nice shader effects and lots of vegetation everywhere.

The Ultra flies through S.T.A.L.K.E.R., as do the GTX and the pair of 8800 GTS cards in SLI. You'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between any of these three solutions by the seat of your pants. Only the poor Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire setup struggles here, showing its age.

Supreme Commander
Here's another new game, and a very popular request for us to try. Like many RTS and isometric-view RPGs, though, Supreme Commander isn't exactly easy to test well, especially with a utility like FRAPS that logs frame rates as you play. Frame rates in this game seem to hit steady plateaus at different zoom levels, complicating the task of getting meaningful, repeatable, and comparable results. For this reason, we used the game's built-in "/map perftest" option to test performance, which plays back a pre-recorded game.

Another note: the frame rates you see below look pretty low, but for this type of game, they're really not bad. We've observed frame rates in the game similar to the numbers from the performance test, but they're still largely acceptable, even at higher resolutions. This is simply different from an action game, where always-fluid motion is required for smooth gameplay.

The Ultra snags the top spot here, aided by the fact that the 8800 GTS in SLI doesn't appear to scale to two cards well in this game. The median low frame rate numbers, meanwhile, are kind of all over the map, which just shows how variable they are in Supreme Commander, for whatever reason.