Here’s a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 performance and settings guide I hope gets out of date really fastAnomalous material
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Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
That makes my usual new-game performance analysis/settings guide song and dance harder to pull off, with or without theappropriate soundtrack. Is S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 in such dire technical straits that we should wait for a few patches before giving it a shake? And how can its best settings be anointed if some, particularlyFSR 3frame generation, simply don’t work as they should?
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
First, let us remind ourselves of the hardware requirements,which were updatedshortly before S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s November 20 launch.
Image credit:GSC Game World
I chose one of these trading hubs as a benchmarking test ground, as it would give the best indication of whether certain hardware really could handle the heat. Some good news did emerge: the GTX 1060 could indeed make do at 1080p, averaging 33fps on the Low preset with some help from FSR in Performance mode. My entry-level gaming laptop, with anRTX 4050, initially fell short, scoring 23fps on Low with Quality-level DLSS – but this shot up to 48fps after enablingDLSS 3’s frame gen, which S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 supports on all RTX 40 series cards.
Oddly, however, swapping in more capable components only raised concerns. The usually nimble RTX 4060 could only barely cope with the Epic preset at native 1080p, averaging 33fps, and worse, dropping all the way to Low only bumped that up to 45fps. That ain’t good for any hopes of teasing big performance improvements out of the quality settings.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
Up at 1440p, the RTX 3070 underperformed, just scraping 32fps on Epic with DLSS on Quality. Dropping to High also didn’t help much, only nudging that up to 38fps, and nor did reducing DLSS to Balanced mode – back on Epic that only got me 34fps, a mere 2fps uptick.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 also doesn’t scale very well with high-end GPUs, and in theRTX 4070 Ti’s case, returned some downright mystifying results. With the Epic preset and Quality DLSS enabled, this averaged 34fps at 1440p and 35fps at 4K, which is… just… no. That’s not how resolutions work, RTX 4070 Ti. The significantly brawnierRTX 4090, meanwhile, could only manage a additional frames at 4K, ending up at 39fps with the same settings. Again, adding DLSS 3 helped, turning the RTX 4070 Ti’s 35fps into 58fps and the RTX 4090’s 39fps into 68fps, but still, I’d expect more from these cards even in a punishing UE5 game.
TheSteam Deck? Forget it – S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 doesn’t even seem to acknowledge its inputs, making it impossible to get past the EULA. That might be for the best, though. I suspect actually trying to run the game would kill the Deck’s widdle APU on the spot.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
Let’s not bother with running through every single quality setting here; when the difference between Epic and Low is as little as 12fps, you can guess how most of the 25-odd individual settings won’t have any real impact on performance. I did test them all, on the RTX 4060, and found a few that can contribute the extra frame or two here and there, so you could try the following combination to beat Epic-level performance without making unnecessary cuts. Just don’t expect to reachmuchhigher than that without DLSS 3 support; likeWarhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is the kind of game that mainly expects you to take the framerates you’re given.
On my RTX 4060, this combination averaged 39fps, which is just 1fps faster than the High preset and 4fps slower than Medium. Which doesn’t sound like much of an improvement, but I found thIS combination produced less noticeable framerate drops and stuttering than High, while maintaining more of the Epic preset’s visual luxuries than Medium does.
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Really, though, hammering any serious performance boost out of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 comes down to one issue: does your PC support DLSS 3? If so, do try that out; adding it to the above settings sent that 39fps up to 78fps, which is much more becoming of the RTX 4060. If not, well, better hope for a miracle in those patches. I can’t really endorse FSR 3 frame gen as an alternative – even when it works, it’s offputtingly blurry, and the amount of input lag it adds could very easily muck up the flow of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s tense, corner-peeking gunfights. In fact, even basic FSR upscaling is awash with messed-up detailing, especially at far distances, hence why I’ve gone for the engine’s built-in TSR upscaler as an alternative for non-RTX systems.
