How To Play Stalker 2 With DLSS/FSR 3 Frame Generation Without Motion Sickness and Reduced Rubber Banding

[SilentHorizon]

Hey all, thought I'd share some tips i've learned over the years with Nvidia and AMD's frame generation technology. Stalker 2 is obviously one of the most demanding games on the market now, and for many mid-range GPU's requires frame generation to get beyond 60 FPS without lowering quality settings.

The biggest disadvantage of frame generation is its notorious input lag, which is necessary since the GPU needs to insert a generated frame after two full frames have been rendered. As a result, frame generation always has this sort of floatiness and rubber banding, that is always there.

However, did you know there's ways to limit this behavior? CPU-based frame rate limiters can significantly improve frame generation playability, and its something people rarely talk about.

When you input a frame rate limit at the CPU, the entire GPU rendering pipeline gets freed up, enabling a static frame rate without variance. On top of this, CPU utilization and GPU utilization go down which = faster render times of each frame, reducing latency further especially on the GPU side. (This is nothing new, E-sports players know that running your GPU at around 50% utilization can provide a latency improvement over just maxing out your FPS.)

So how do you do this? The in-game Unreal Engine 5 frame rate limiter won't work. You have to use The RivaTuner Statistics Server - RTSS frame rate limiter. However, you can't just run it out of the box. You need to change one setting, to go setup, scroll down to compatibility properties, then go to the frame rate limiter drop down menu and select "NVIDIA Reflex".

This is absolutely required, since the other option's aren't compatible with frame generation (maybe with FSR 3 frame gen but most certainly not DLSS). Either way, you should run the Nvidia Reflex option in RTSS regardless, as it sets a frame rate limiter at the CPU level, using the same behavior as Reflex to reduce latency. You can run this on AMD cards and Intel cards, and you'll get the same benefits of having Reflex enabled.

All you have to do next is set a locked frame rate that you can mostly hit. Obviously this game is super demanding, so preferably lock it to a frame rate your system can hit during actual gameplay, and not roaming in cities when all your doing is trading and interacting with NPCs.

Hope this helps! For me personally, this is the only way i like to game with frame generation. It reduces latency to the point where frame generation is actually comparable to non-frame generation gameplay.

[Tranquilo Sunrise]

Good post. on my 4090 4k/Epic I can get around 110fps so I set Rivatuner to 100. This stabilizes the input lag and kills microstutter. If you want to see what your latency looks like in graph form my advice would be to use MSI Afterburner and open up the hardware monitor. Then keep an eye on your "Frametime, ms" graph. This is your latency. if its up/down and all over the place you will experience microstutter.

When I lock my fps to 100 vis Rivatuner my latency no longer looks like a heartbeat monitor and it stays locked at 10ms. you may think "nah im losing 10-20fps. But trust me when I say I'm getting a much more premium gaming experience then you are. You can't beat a gaming experience where your latency is dialed in this way.

[EineRundeGeht]

my game crashes every 20 min using fsr3 on

[Quick☢420™]

Lossless scaling, has anyone tried it with this game yet? It has notoriously low input lag with Frame Generation.

[Tytonic]

Thanks for the advice! Unfortunately, enabling Nvidia Reflex didn't help reduce input lag much on my Radeon 7900XT- I think there's a small difference, but it's hard to tell. However- enabling Nvidia Reflex DID somehow boost my framerate by ~15%, which returned it to what I got pre-updated 1.01. The update made performance much worse for me.

[SilentHorizon]

Originally posted by Tytonic:

Thanks for the advice! Unfortunately, enabling Nvidia Reflex didn't help reduce input lag much on my Radeon 7900XT- I think there's a small difference, but it's hard to tell. However- enabling Nvidia Reflex DID somehow boost my framerate by ~15%, which returned it to what I got pre-updated 1.01. The update made performance much worse for me.

Alright so I've been having issues with Reflex as well. Been spending a ton of time figuring out how to get low latency in this game without Reflex.

Its possible, you just need to edit a ini file.

head to C:\Users\[username]AppData\Local\Stalker2\Saved\Config\Windows

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/857084840292778014/1313175639423193099/image.png?ex=674f2d9e&is=674ddc1e&hm=f3809c31ecde3592de1eacd76cec347e4dc95df42250863a2ad8e890fe515390&

Locate the GameUserSettings.ini

Add the following to the file:

[SystemSettings]
r.OneFrameThreadLag=0

Note: If you don't notice a latency improvement, the GameUserSettings.ini implementation may not work. If so, create a text doc called "Engine.ini" and put the above setting into the file. That works for me.

This will duplicate what Reflex does but at the in-game engine level. So its much better.

Then in that same file, if needed, change your frame rate limit if you want to run a frame rate limiter (i'd recommend it).

One more thing, if you are running Windows 11, run the game in Administrator mode. The best way to do this is to just run Steam in admin mode, then all games you launch will run elevated.

This resolved 90% of my stuttering problems. Its actually incredible. Not surprised though, Windows has so many issues...

[SilentHorizon]

For reference, this brought my input latency down from 51 ms all the way down to 30 ms. So a MASSIVE difference. I recorded the same input lag reduction as with Reflex enabled, but with no framerate hitching.

[smpsnja]

This comment is awaiting analysis by our automated content check system. It will be temporarily hidden until we verify that it does not contain harmful content (e.g. links to websites that attempt to steal information).

[Madnesis]

Reducing my framerate to the minimum FPS I'm getting during sever drops (68), with FSR FG + NVIDIA Reflex enabled, plus other Engine.ini / Input.ini make things worse, adding approximately 4 ms latency. Any idea why?

[Ezurak]

@Quick☢420™ I tested Lossless scaling with my RTX2070 Super and it seems to work well. can have 75fps (♥♥♥♥ monitor) on Ultra quality with DLAA (no upsclaling but necessary to avoid the hardcore sharpness of the game).
I'm using auto upscale and 2x frame gen.

[Boogy]

thanks for the suggestion to op. any idea how to limit fps before frame generation is applied?

[★DZїMă$iK★BY™]

Originally posted by Boogy:

thanks for the suggestion to op. any idea how to limit fps before frame generation is applied?

You can limit the frame rate in the NVIDIA control panel, but it's better to type your query into the search engine.