Stalker 2 Thread

[UltraMega]

Stalker 2 is out!

 

So far, the game is a lot of fun, but there are some performance issues for sure. 

 

Essentially, no CPU can hold a steady 60FPS 100% of the time, but CPUs like the 7800X3D get pretty close. There are some towns in the game that are heavily populated with NPCs that will cause frame dips on any system, but these areas are not typically places you will be in combat so it's not a huge issue. With a powerful CPU, you can stay pretty close to a steady 60FPS in combat area most of the time, though frequent short dips are going to happen on all but the most powerful CPUs. 

 

On my system (5800X/7900XT) the FPS is a mostly steady 60FPS in combat areas with somewhat frequent dips into the 50s. Lowering settings doesn't really do much, so I'm playing on a mix of mostly epic setting with a few things set to high and 66% resolution scaling with TSR upscaling to 4K. It looks pretty good at these settings and TSR has come a long way, though anyone with an Nvidia card will surely want to use DLSS instead. I might give a 30FPS cap a try and crank up the resolution as much as possible at some point. Apparently motion blur is broken at 30FPS but it can be forced in the .ini file. Given the level of visuals in this game, 30FPS might not be so bad. Halo was 30FPS until Halo 5. 

 

That said, the game looks fantastic. The asset quality is not quite as high as something like Hellblade 2, but it being a UE5 open world game that uses nanite and lumen, it's pretty impressive. 

 

The combat is good, very reminiscent of the first games but without feeling dated. The high level visuals and audio definitely add to the immersion level.

 

The game is very dark. There is a black level setting in the game that defaults to "-4" (for me at least) and increasing it to "0" actually makes the image darker. I thought increasing it would make it brighter, and I set it to "0" at first and ended up playing the first hour or so with the game darker than it's supposed to be. 

 

 

Anyone with a high end rig should check this game out. Don't expect perfectly smooth performance unless you have a 7800X3D/9800X3D and even then there will be some dips in populated areas, but it's pushing the limits hard enough to justify the dips to some extent. One thing to keep in mind is this game is very CPU limited so you might as well turn up the graphics settings because you're going to get dips either way. Using V-sync or an FPS cap is an absolute must for this game as well. 

 

 

 

 

STALKER 2 Benchmarks & PC Performance Analysis

WWW.DSOGAMING.COM

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Powered by Unreal Engine 5, it's time now to benchmark STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl and examine its performance on the PC.

 

Edited Thursday at 21:07 by UltraMega

[UltraMega]

Pro tip: the dogs are blind, so they won't attack you if you don't make any noise. 

[Slaughtahouse]

Thanks for dropping your impressions.

 

I’m really intrigued and want to support the devs. I’ve read a few reviews and just watch that performance vid from DF.

 

It obviously needs work but it’s not CD Projekt or Bethesda level, launch jank.

 

I think this will be my winter holiday game. So I’ll give it a few weeks but excited to give it a go!

[xtenduke]

Pretty rough on my sig rig, DLSS balanced on 5120x2160 and medium settings with some lows nets me ~50-60 fps

Frame gen results in sickening input lag 

Also FOV scale is borked for ultrawides unfortunately

 

I wasn't expecting it to run so poorly honestly, I wonder if we will see support for hardware raytracing 

Tempted to pick up a 7900 XTX instead of waiting for 5000 series

[SamsTechStuff]

Nice, looks like an interesting game. Wow at those system specs - I only read the article linked, will watch the video later but, definitely going to break some hearts there. Is this dev known for putting out performance updates or do we just need the 5000 series now? 

 

Edit: Finished the video, looks good outside if the minor shadow grows they mentioned. Brutal on that Ryzen 3600 and in that underground room with the NPCs and an x3d.

Edited Friday at 03:36 by SamsTechStuff

[UltraMega]

5 hours ago, SamsTechStuff said:

Is this dev known for putting out performance updates or do we just need the 5000 series now? 

Haha well... the thing is that for a UE5 game that uses lumen and nanite and is open world with meta-human NPCs running around, the performance is actually really good. With the exception of extra dips in the heavily populated areas, the performance is about on par with other UE5 games, some of which are not open world. I get similar performance when I'm just playing the game normally that I got with Hellblade 2 which is another UE5 game with similar features but is very linear.

 

This game is running on UE5.1 I think, and as I understand meta-human is pretty expensive in UE5.1. UE5.5 apparently adds some major optimizations to meta-human. Maybe a major patch down the road could update to the newer version of meta-human, but I have no idea how easy or hard that would be to do. 

[UltraMega]

Still really enjoying this game. Despite some of the issues, the game play overall is exactly what I wanted it to be so far. 

 

I've been weighing myself down in the game by being too much of a hoarder. Everyone you kill has loot that can be sold, and their guns can be worth a lot so I've been spending way too much time running back and forth farming loot rather than moving the story forward.  I love that the game lets you do that, but I realized I was making the game feel like more of a chore than it should and now I'm trying to avoid hoarding as much. When I play a game like this, I usually won't buy any upgrades until have 2-3 times what it costs saved up... which is probably not the most effective way to do things, but the game gives the freedom to be inefficient and hoard as much as I want, and that's cool.

 

I guess the NPCs were supposed to have a big system controlling their actions and would have NPCs be in factions and just have more going on than they do now but I guess it's bugged so that's not in the game right now. Still, without that it's a lot of fun. It's kinda funny because the first stalker game was supposed to have a faction system and it didn't make it into the game until the second stalker game came out. I'm sure that won't be the case here as the devs have promised to get it fixed as soon as they can, but just kinda funny in the sense that the game launching without the faction system makes it a true OG experience. 

 

Edited Saturday at 21:23 by UltraMega