PC and Xbox Series consoles tested.
Suit up Stalker, let’s explore the lay of the land on PC and Xbox Series X/S.
Textures are uniformly extremely high-res, and any old piece of rusty junk holds up to close scrutiny.
Every gun I’ve encountered so far looks excellent - and sounds great when fired too.
I was pleasantly surprised by the variety here.
The 2007 release barely featured cutscenes, but there are a good number here.
Stalker 2’s presentation is impressive then, but I do have small criticisms of some visual elements.
First, there are too few shadow-casting lights, something I noticed with people gathered around a campfire.
The biggest issue comes from Lumen global illumination.
The quality mode looks a lot better, with an internal resolution at or around 1440p.
With that out of the way, let’s talk technical issues - starting with performance.
On PC, there’s a long shader precompilation step that appears to work perfectly.
Instead, I think the CPU-related performance issues are due to streaming data during world traversal.
Even at epic configs that exceed the Series X release, we’re CPU-limited up to around 100fps.
Frame-time spikes can exceed 50ms, with frame-rates peaking in the 50s.
Suffice it to say, this game is extremely CPU-limited.
Therefore, a VRR display is nearly essential, though the game can still feel choppy in CPU-limited moments.
Frame-times level out afterwards, but Series X is still around 40fps.
Frame-times are also erratic when the camera moves, disrupting the VRR presentation.
The full freeze needs to be fixed, as this is pretty much never acceptable in a shipping game.
There is a setting for this in the menus, but it only applies to cutscenes at present.
That’s the current state of affairs, but fingers crossed that performance can be improved with future patches.
