Over the last few months, many gamers have been eagerly awaiting the days of November 2009 when a few of the first DirectX 11 titles could be expected to go on sale. This weekend, Ukrainian developer GSC Game World released its third game in its survival-based FPS series. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat has now been introduced to a significant portion of Europe’s gaming audience, making its way into Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Unfortunately, the rest of Europe and the United States will have to wait until sometime in early Q1 2010 to get their hands on it.
Call of Pripyat is the sequel to last year’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl and was developed on the X-Ray 1.6 engine with inherent support for preliminary DirectX 11 API features, including hardware tessellation and contact hardened shadows. The events of Call of Pripyat take place in 2012 and unfold shortly after the end of Shadow of Chernobyl, when the government decides to hold a large-scale military "Fairway" operation aimed to take the CNPP under control after having discovered the open path to the Zone center. The interesting new aspect of gameplay in Call of Pripyat lies in the fact it will feature a photorealistic exclusion Zone. Pripyat town, Yanov railway station, Jupiter factory, Kopachi village and a few other locations have all been recreated by their true-to-life prototypes.
The X-Ray 1.6 engine by Ukrainian developer GSC Game World offers a satisfying variety of Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) modes to choose from including High Definition AO and Horizon Based AO, both with Motion Blur. At the same time, the Deferred Lighting effects like Bloom, God Rays and Adaptive Tone mapping give the game a unique sense of photorealism when compared to its predecessor and display an added depth to the atmosphere of indoor levels in particular.
Over the past few weeks, there have already been several benchmark reports of the game running on DirectX 11 hardware from AMD. Today, our friends over at PC Games Hardware have released 20 new high-resolution screenshots of DirectX 11 gameplay. According to the site, they were all taken at 1920x1200 with 4x MSAA and 16x AF on maximum settings with DirectX 11 enabled.
The full screenshot gallery can be found here.