Few Tips in running the game smoothly.

[Perkins]

Hello Folks.
This is more of information post on how to run the game.
This guide might shed some light or might state the obvious to some of you.
The following information is provided from my tinkering of the game.
For reference here are my PC specs.

PC Specs:

CPU: Ryzen 5 3600 (6 Core CPU).
DDR4: 32GB 3200MHZ
HDD: NVME -980 EVO.
GPU : RTX 3070Ti 8GB.

Okay if your case is the following this guide might be what you are looking for.
You are playing the game, you are enjoying your stable FPS however at key points the FPS takes a dumpster dive into slug fest and you dip below 10FPS with little to no recovery.

This mainly happens when you are in the Trade Hubs/Cut scenes.
If this is the case, then most likely you are running out of VRAM on your GPU.

It seems that the latest release of STALKER 2, 8GB is not enough to run the game on Epic settings with everything cranked on max.
From my tests, the dip begins at around 7.5(GB) of usage of my GPU.
Once i dipped below this number the game managed to recover.

Mind you when i am playing outside the trade hubs, with all my settings i am ran the game around 90-120 FPS.
However when its plot time or trade hub time, the DPS sinks heavily in these game moments.

So here are my settings that allow me to play smoothly and keep the game within range of about 6-7(GB) with buffer of 500mb until it goes critical.

Settings preset (Custom)
Object Quality:
Texture quality <High>
Hair <Medium>
Object Details <High>
Effect Quality <High>
Materials <High>

Post processing:
Post processing <Low>
Anti aliasing <Low>
Motion blur quality <Low>
Motion blur strength <100>
Depth of field <Medium>
Light shafts <Enabled>
Sharpness <20>

Performance boost:
Upscaling method <DLSS>
Upscaling quality <Quality>
Resolution Scale <66>
FSR 3 Frame Generation <Enabled>

Shading Quality:
Shading quality <Low>
Global Illumination <Low>
Reflections <Medium>
Shadow Quality <Medium>

Environment quality:
Clouds <Medium>
Fog <Medium>
Sky <Medium>
Foliage quality <Medium>
Environment draw distance <Medium>

The following settings allow me to run the game smoothly through most of the game play without the need to reload the game to get a smooth frame rate again.
If you have multiple monitor setup, i suggest if you can help it turn the second monitor off, as displaying stuff on the secondary monitors takes VRAM as well, therefore leaving you less headroom for performance.

I hope the following information will allow you to tweak your game and allow you to game with more ease while the developers work and prepare more optimization patches for us ahead.

[¡ꟻRXƧ^]

thanks a lot that fixed it for me! do you think they can fix this in the future?

[Perkins]

Originally posted by ¡ꟻRXƧ^:

thanks a lot that fixed it for me! do you think they can fix this in the future?

Hello there, glad the idea of tweaking the settings helped you out.

Regarding your question, i believe that the developers can do a lot of work to optimize the game and make it run smoother.
A lot of fixes and quality of life things need to be done.
So we will see in the upcoming months or years.

However it is important to note few things.

1. Optimization costs time and money to the company.
I believe that GSC will do most of the stuff in their ability to get this game from the rough sink hole it is now.

2. The developers will surely attempt to allow decent experience to as many consumers as possible, as limiting this game only to high-end PC users will limit revenue at some point.
However it is important to know, that performance is scaled along time and technology.
So it means that benchmark for mid-high tier PC hardware will scale.
So for example the 8GB GPU like RTX 3070Ti, while powerful GPU in its own right, its getting older and 8GB is just not enough for future games.
So 12GB or 16GB will gradually become the norm in the future as i see it.

This is a bit hard even for me to come to terms with, that i will need to upgrade my GPU and CPU in closest year to something more robust if i want 1440p/4K gaming on max settings.

[¡ꟻRXƧ^]

Originally posted by Perkins:

Originally posted by ¡ꟻRXƧ^:

thanks a lot that fixed it for me! do you think they can fix this in the future?

Hello there, glad the idea of tweaking the settings helped you out.

Regarding your question, i believe that the developers can do a lot of work to optimize the game and make it run smoother.
A lot of fixes and quality of life things need to be done.
So we will see in the upcoming months or years.

However it is important to note few things.

1. Optimization costs time and money to the company.
I believe that GSC will do most of the stuff in their ability to get this game from the rough sink hole it is now.

2. The developers will surely attempt to allow decent experience to as many consumers as possible, as limiting this game only to high-end PC users will limit revenue at some point.
However it is important to know, that performance is scaled along time and technology.
So it means that benchmark for mid-high tier PC hardware will scale.
So for example the 8GB GPU like RTX 3070Ti, while powerful GPU in its own right, its getting older and 8GB is just not enough for future games.
So 12GB or 16GB will gradually become the norm in the future as i see it.

This is a bit hard even for me to come to terms with, that i will need to upgrade my GPU and CPU in closest year to something more robust if i want 1440p/4K gaming on max settings.

I think their main focus is on fixing the most important bugs so the game is playable story wise. After that comes optimization, but im glad they are already working on weekly patches. I use a RTX 3070 on my own, which is just about 3% worse than the TI version and it sucks to have around 60 fps with everything on high but suddenly drop to 5 fps in crowded areas. But hey atleast its smoothly playable with your mentioned settings. If GSC cant fix it in the future im sure mods will do so.

Thanks again for posting this!

[Perkins]

Originally posted by ¡ꟻRXƧ^:

Originally posted by Perkins:

Hello there, glad the idea of tweaking the settings helped you out.

Regarding your question, i believe that the developers can do a lot of work to optimize the game and make it run smoother.
A lot of fixes and quality of life things need to be done.
So we will see in the upcoming months or years.

However it is important to note few things.

1. Optimization costs time and money to the company.
I believe that GSC will do most of the stuff in their ability to get this game from the rough sink hole it is now.

2. The developers will surely attempt to allow decent experience to as many consumers as possible, as limiting this game only to high-end PC users will limit revenue at some point.
However it is important to know, that performance is scaled along time and technology.
So it means that benchmark for mid-high tier PC hardware will scale.
So for example the 8GB GPU like RTX 3070Ti, while powerful GPU in its own right, its getting older and 8GB is just not enough for future games.
So 12GB or 16GB will gradually become the norm in the future as i see it.

This is a bit hard even for me to come to terms with, that i will need to upgrade my GPU and CPU in closest year to something more robust if i want 1440p/4K gaming on max settings.

I think their main focus is on fixing the most important bugs so the game is playable story wise. After that comes optimization, but im glad they are already working on weekly patches. I use a RTX 3070 on my own, which is just about 3% worse than the TI version and it sucks to have around 60 fps with everything on high but suddenly drop to 5 fps in crowded areas. But hey atleast its smoothly playable with your mentioned settings. If GSC cant fix it in the future im sure mods will do so.

Thanks again for posting this!

I believe that's what they are doing, with the latest patches i managed to tweak the settings differently to offer higher graphical fidelity without going "critical".
So from my perspective GSC does stuff under the hood to allow more systems to run the games better.

I've heard there are major issues with A-Life 2 system that caused a lot of issues in the game.
From what i've heard the A-Life 2 system is very taxing and demands a lot of resources from the PC.
Therefore the developers had to "re-adjust" it to allow it to function differently.
However these last minute adjustments resulted in a lot of bugs and problems that they did not foresee and now fixing.

Which leaves to believe, that as system A-Life 2 has been made from start to finish, but they realized that maybe only the very high end machines would be able to run the game, Which will hurt their results on machines like X-Box one and mid-low tiered PC's.

[halüsinasyon]

This is actually worked.

I took your post as an example and configured my in-game graphic settings while looking at the GPU usage in task manager. I realized that if GPU usage reaches %99, game drops to 10 fps after sometime and stays like that. According to this, i adjusted my in-game settings to not let my GPU usage reach %99. After some tinkering in the in-game settings, i managed to set my GPU usage between %80-85. Then as a result, i played the game for like 2 hours
(i went to places with lot of npcs like Zalissya and other base places) and never experienced a single fps drop. Now my game runs smoothly at 60-75 fps without any fps drop.

This would be so much easier if there was in-game indicator that shows how much my GPU being used by the game. Nevertheless, thank you.

[Private Pyle]

ty ill try, i still get a massive frame drop after playing for 10-15 min.

[¡ꟻRXƧ^]

Originally posted by Private Pyle:

ty ill try, i still get a massive frame drop after playing for 10-15 min.

it also depends on which other software you have running while playing and also how many monitors you use. And ofc it depends on which GPU you use.

[Chilli-Göttinger]

change resolution to 1920x if its preset 2500x or such, that worked wonders during the first days

[Sgt. Flaw]

So you castrate your settings for a 20 second cutscene? Makes 0 sense

[KaneKool]

I say again, RTX 30XX and below and DDR4 are not going do any good, not even low low setting. Just keep away from game until you buy better rig!

[Sgt. Flaw]

Originally posted by KaneKool:

I say again, RTX 30XX and below and DDR4 are not going do any good, not even low low setting. Just keep away from game until you buy better rig!

This absurd....I'm at 90 fps with a 3600x and 3060ti

Guarantee you DDR 4 vrs 5 makes virtually any difference

[Perkins]

Originally posted by halüsinasyon:

This is actually worked.

I took your post as an example and configured my in-game graphic settings while looking at the GPU usage in task manager. I realized that if GPU usage reaches %99, game drops to 10 fps after sometime and stays like that. According to this, i adjusted my in-game settings to not let my GPU usage reach %99. After some tinkering in the in-game settings, i managed to set my GPU usage between %80-85. Then as a result, i played the game for like 2 hours
(i went to places with lot of npcs like Zalissya and other base places) and never experienced a single fps drop. Now my game runs smoothly at 60-75 fps without any fps drop.

This would be so much easier if there was in-game indicator that shows how much my GPU being used by the game. Nevertheless, thank you.

Glad that tweaks of settings sorted the issue for you.
I used MSI Afterburner software to get the stats hud i needed for debugging my settings for my rig.
Since 1.0.3 patch the game started to run even better for me.
Going to try to include the shadows and other effects today, will see how much of performance hit or stability i can achieve while dancing around better visuals and performance.

[Perkins]

Originally posted by Private Pyle:

ty ill try, i still get a massive frame drop after playing for 10-15 min.

Sure thing, give us an update on your progress if you can.
Rig specs will be nice to have as well.

[Nite69]

running an app called RAMMap to clear the Standby List before you start the game will help performance too this is what I been doing to be able to play longer before the lag drop happens

the game has a memory leak right now and it will only run smoothly for a limited ammount of time until they fix it

[StrongPointGER]

I don't know what is the problem. I always have 130FPS on epic and 4k on the open and around 80-100FPS in combat. No massive frame drops anymore, no lags.

Want to know which hardware? You can see it on my profile.