What are we looking for in gaming performance wise? First off, obviously Guru3D tends to think that all games should be played at the best image quality (IQ) possible. There's a dilemma though, IQ often interferes with the performance of a graphics card. We measure this in FPS, the number of frames a graphics card can render per second, the higher it is the more fluently your game will display itself.  A game's frames per second (FPS) is a measured average of a series of tests. That test often is a time demo, a recorded part of the game which is a 1:1 representation of the actual game and its gameplay experience. After forcing the same image quality settings; this time-demo is then used for all graphics cards so that the actual measuring is as objective as can be.

Frames per second / Gameplay

<30 FPS  - very limited gameplay
30-40 FPS - average yet very playable
40-60 FPS  - good gameplay
>60 FPS - best possible gameplay

So if a graphics card barely manages less than 30 FPS, then the game is not very playable, we want to avoid that at all cost.  With 30 FPS up-to roughly 40 FPS you'll be very able to play the game with perhaps a tiny stutter at certain graphically intensive parts. Overall a very enjoyable experience. Match the best possible resolution to this result and you'll have the best possible rendering quality versus resolution, hey you want both of them to be as high as possible. When a graphics card is doing 60 FPS on average or higher then you can rest assured that the game will likely play extremely smoothly at every point in the game, turn on every possible in-game IQ setting.
Over 100 FPS? You have either a MONSTER of graphics card or a very old game.

- Single GPU increases up to 11% in 3DMark Vantage (performance preset)
- Single GPU increases up to 11% in Assassin's Creed DX10
- Single GPU increases up to 15% in Bioshock DX10
- Single GPU increases up to 15% in Call of Duty 4
- Single GPU increases up to 8% in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
- 2-way SLI increases up to 7% in Bioshock DX10
- 2-way SLI increases up to 10% in Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts DX10
- 2-way SLI increases up to 12% in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
- 2-way SLI increases up to 10% in World in Conflict DX10

Stardock has a similar utility called TweakVista that dows the same thing by turning off various services but that program cost money as well as do not hook into the various other AMD utilities. The price for that extra features is that it requiers a AMD Series-7 motherboard to work. To get the Overdrive hook working properly you might also have to update the bios of the motherboard. The utility still is in beta-state which we noticed as we could not get the Catalyst auto-tune and AMD Overdrive settings to save before starting the expert profile and the fact that it still is a bit buggy but as the utility is maturing it should become a usefull utility for all AMD-owners. The utility officially only supports Vista 32-bit but AMD said users of both Vista 64-bit and Windows XP can try it out as it should already work even there. The plan is to have official support for those two operatingssystems as well.

Stalker: Clear Sky knows only two ways of running: very slow or absolutely playable. Depending on the scene or level the framerate is below 20 fps or climbs to more than 40 fps - but we experienced the former to happen more often. Anisotropic filtering is recommendable since it doesn't cost a lot of performance. But you should abstain from any kind of anti-aliasing. MSAA already lowers the fps without improving the optics very much. Better graphics can be achieved via transparency FSAA or SSAA, but both modes are unplayable in Stalker: Clear Sky. In higher resolutions at least, the graphics cards with a lot of video memory can beat their less equipped competitors. The Geforce 8800 GTX for example is 14 percent faster than the 9800 GTX+ at 1,680 x 1,050. AMD's HD 4800s are doing quite well - we cannot confirm the rumors from Russian forums that the Radeon cards would deliver insufficient performance only. The Geforce GTX 260 seems to suffer from driver related problems. Multi GPU systems are scaling extremely well (up to 100 percent) with the X-Ray Engine - not very surprising since the engine is not new. A special multi GPU article with videos will be released by next week.

If you want to play Stalker: Clear Sky with all details in DX 10 a t a resolution of 1,680 x 1,050, you will have to use a multi GPU solution. If you don't need high framerates you can do with Geforce GTX 280 or a Radeon HD 4870. At 1,280 x 1,024 a Geforce 8800 GTX, 9800 GTX+ or a HD 4850 do quite well, but you will have to go down to 1,024 x 768 to make them display the game really smooth. Stalker: Clear Sky requires a lot of RAM and video memory. Currently we are testing what processor is best, but at the moment more than one core seems to be useless.

The Crytek team originally planned simply to give the Warhead PC's specs to EA to use for the recommended requirements, but eventually Nvidia got involved and it became clear that there was no reason that such a machine couldn't simply be sold straight to consumers looking for an easy entry (or re-entry) into PC gaming.

Though I don't have every nitty gritty hardware detail, I did get the machine's most important specs:
- CPU: Intel Core Duo e7300 (@2.66GHz)
- Video card: Nvidia 9800GT
- RAM: 2GB

I snapped a picture of the Warhead PC I used today. It had no external branding, and it wasn't clear whether the final version (which can be preordered next week and will ship alongside Crysis Warhead on September 16) will, although a Crysis-themed desktop background will be preloaded. It's a visually conservative rig, but I appreciated that there weren't a dozen obnoxious blue neon lights swirling visibly through a plexiglass window—we'll see what the shipping machine brings.