Sometimes it feels like you guys are actually the only ones who do great technical coverage of games, from everyone else it just boils down to oh it run bad.
@xtr.7662 nanite also only seems to beat traditional LOD and Tesselation at 75% quad overdraw in a scene which is insanely bad. In General UE isnt really "performant" in its current state and even 5.5 doesnt change that
As soon as I saw it's outdated thick SSAO artifacts i knew Stalker 2 would be a hard pass for me. Also the usual unreal engine issues are unpleasant. To me the only impressive next gen rt game tech so far is The Callisto Protocol. The game devs dismissed the build in UE4 rt features and implemented a custom solution and it shows. With the PS5 pro patch the game runs even in 8k with full ray tracing and looks way better than so many new UE5 games.
@@xtr.7662 They do. I have a 4090 and Fortnite maxed out graphic settings with nanite and lumen at 3440x1440 barely gets over 100 fps most of the time.
Yeah that don't make no sense.. I wonder if that's a bug, or something they had to turn off to try to fix a bug? Like I'm not saying go the Half-Life 2 route where you break everything else in order to get flashlight shadows lol.. But like.. Man the the dynamicentially lighting for stalker was like kind of the that was like the clenching core that made it look good, and made the underground look amazing. This is like this feels like kind of like you missed the bushes for the trees or something I don't know.. or is it the trunks for the leaves? Or wait like maybe it's just way too much grass for the trees? Like I'm I'm not making this work.. Little details matter, bigger details don't nearly as much especially when an absence of those little details that help sell your world. I mean I guess the modern game really doesn't care but like you know I do.. and so I'm going to complain about it, cuz you know that's that's really all I can do other than mods which I already am going to do and already have to do for most games nowadays lol.
Hell Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition has these. Considering how performant that game is and how amazing it looks, I wish more developers designed their lighting around infinite-bounce RTGI.
Makes you really appreciate what Rockstar were able to achieve with RDR2. When you watch all those tech demos, where they showcase all the new advanced game engine tools that are supposed to simplify and speed up game development and improve performance. Why do these UE5 games feel like the quality is regressing? Is it the tools or have all the talent left the industry that would know how to leverage the tools? I get that in Stalkers 2 case it's a CPU bound game, which is why it tanks performance. But just speaking about AAA games in general, feels like they've taken 3 steps back to take I step forward.
My first thought is that a lot of companies hedged too many bets on UE5 without a comprehensive understanding of it's limitations, or without respect for the engineering acumen that is still required to make good game, UE5 or otherwise. But that doesn't explain the degradation in quality in other franchises, even very large and successful ones that still use their own in-house developer tools. Call of Duty comes to mind here, as it's technical quality peaked in 2019 with Modern Warfare (that game was one of the most beautiful games I've ever seen and ran great) and the subsequent releases have regressed since then. I think across the board it's just becoming more difficult to attain the skilled labor needed for the complex engineering work of modern game development. Even the largest companies are having trouble, it would seem. The problem would be even more challenging for smaller companies to navigate.
Game scope has massively increased, more experienced devs who defined the 2000s era are slowly retiring and companies are ignoring optimization at an attempt to please investors, while also having CEOs who only care about short term profit over game quality and long term profit. Dice is a prime example where the majority of the senior devs left after BF1 and a lot of the ones still there left after BFV and the result was 2042.
the NPCs destroy performance but barely do anything interesting either, what the hell is it even using the CPU for when all they do mostly is stand or sit somewhere, compare that to something like RDR2, NPCs in that are so much more interactive, reactive and dynamic, and they had that running on the ancient ps4 cpu
And if the whole AI system is nowhere near as robust as original Stalker as people are reporting, then game suffering when NPC's are in play even when doing basic things is very questionable.
rdr2 on pc smilar hardware on ps4 xbox one when you come town fps drop drmaticly when you come city it drops 10fps. on open areas good if you reduce grass. elden ring also reducing grass smooth things making grass medium instead of high. new consoles on pefromace mode elden ring grass lows thats why peformance mod every other settings kinda same. if you make grass high on performance mod the resolsation cut not enough.
Damn performance on this generation is just laughable across the board! Am I the only one who thinks Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition looks better than this game while also running perfectly smooth?
It looks absolutely amazing imo. Idk why is everyone talking sh1t about this game.. Texture quality and vegetation quality/density look absolutely stunning and I’ve never seen a game looking this good. Sure, there are things like missing muzzle and flashlight shadows and that definitely sucks but I still think the game looks amazing. People talk sh1t because they get bad performance on their 6 years old hardware..
@belec5964 No, people talk sh*t because even on the best hardware, with "cheating" by using frame generation and DLSS, they barely get 60fps and even that has dips. And this game is NOT that impressive. This isn't Crysis from 2007. It's not mind blowing, it's not doing anything new. It's just poorly optimized. In fact, Crysis STILL does a lot more than this game does lmao.
The developers did an interview back in October saying the game could drop to 55 fps on the Xbox Series X during intense combat and also discussed the possibility of bringing 60 fps to the Xbox Series S. I honestly expected it to launch in better condition after reading that.
Nothing against the devs whatsoever (I know this game was made in very difficult conditions), but after Cyberpunk and console PUBG, I never trust comments about performance before launch lol. I think most people have forgotten that Brenden Greene said PUBG was hitting 45 FPS on Xbox One, and 60 on the One X, only for the game to release and often run in the teens despite looking worse than many PS2 and OG Xbox games lol
The bugs were expected. They're almost a feature of this franchise lol. The important thing is that the game is good content-wise. The bugs should be ironed out with a few patches. Nothing against the devs. They did good. This is an old school game and a welcome change these days.
Considering it’s a dense open world UE5 title, that remembers where you drop anything like a Bethesda title on top of it, I’m actually surprised it runs as well as it does considering how punishing this engine has been on console so far, and that image quality is this good. The consoles are aging. I’m sure they’ll get there, but I would have been shocked if this was a locked 60 or even close to it at launch without severe image degredation.
The only one of the original trilogy that came as poorly optimized (as stalker 2) is Clear Sky. And it still can be explained by the fact that it was pretty advanced when it came out(16y ago btw) and out of the 3 is the best looking, yet unstable(talking about vanilla ofc, no mods). None of that applies to stalker 2, it's looks good(expect the lighting, but that's only on some spots) but nothing ground breaking
It’s bugged, but I’ve been playing for 5 hours now and I’m immersed. One thing I liked was I haven’t come across any texture pop-in, unlike Silent Hill 2 Remake that I finished last week. The frame rate is far from locked. It’s also way too dark so you gotta play around with the brightness in the settings.
I like the game also, but the game needs to be better optimized. About visuals, are nice, but nothing that we haven´t seen. I hate UE engines! I have a nice PC with a 4080s, play only at 1440p, but I do not like the frametime i´m getting and the FPS.
Haven't come across any texture pop-in? In the first minute of the game I experienced trees popping in and an anomaly popping in as I drew closer. Literally the first area after the first cutscene, the blue glowing pillars and trees were popping in as I walked close.
More background systems, logic and calculations than older games and also, newer games definitely tend to be more OW with alot more NPC’s on screen than a lot older games.
bcouse they are early acces now. until 2020 pc games also coming physcal format. not like every one claiming pchyscal pc games gone on 2013s with steam rise. since 2020 with cyberpunk you can see dramatic problems on even pc. mostly due to now there is no dead line to press disc so bascily they are early access like games no need to critcal day one patch if there is no disc relase.
@@jose131991 not true look at ac unity streets its almost full of people you cant walk strait even and city is huge. now other games 6 npc drop frame on small village lol.
@MrStrangermoon I'm not an expert at lot, but when it comes to STALKER2 specificaly it's could be caused by nanite and Metahumans. At least from what I've heard, nanite is great to display insane amount of poligons, buts it better to have every object in scene using this feature. Because activating nanite comes with its own overhead. So if you have half of objects are not using it - you still have overhead if CPU-time, and sometimes it makes framerate even lower than scene with fully off nanite. Also, metahumans looks CPU demanding. It's kinda unfortunate that some issues of the engine was patched only in later versions. Like nanite for fooliage in UE5.2 (or UE5.3). And metahumans optimizations in latest UE5.5. Really interesting how it could performs and looks if they started development now on UE5.5. At least, there are possibilities to optimize their custom logic and code, and also take some source code from UE5.5 to make current game run better and support features that UE5.1 didn't when they're switched from UE4.
Mocap is quite good all round, as is the facial animation and lip-sync. Compare this to the minimum-viable-effort I see in Dragon Age: Veilguard and this small publisher and dev team puts everyone at EA to shame.
One point I'd disagree on - and this is a personal preference: I'd actually prefer if the English language audio was spoken by someone with a 'local' accent. At least, it's far more jarring for me to hear, say, a random American accent out of context than Ukrainian-accented voices speaking English. Again, personal preference. There are people all over the world that speak clearly and authentically albeit not in their mother tongue. Nothing wrong with hearing them, if not done by ham actors of course.
I concur. Though I agree with Alex that playing with the Ukranian dialog would _technically_ be the superior option, I don't speak Ukranian, so I would need to turn on subtitles. Personally, I don't enjoy playing games or watching films while staring at a bunch of immersion-ruining text at the bottom of the screen most of the time instead of actually paying attention to what's happening on screen. I find the argument that the player character wouldn't perceive the accents to be a bit absurd, as they wouldn't perceive English either. I get that he was trying to equate it to something akin to native understanding, but personally I find the use of accents to be an acceptable compromise between the immersion of the proper language and the ability to actually understand what is being said without reading a bunch of text. If I wanted to read, I'd reach for a book, not play video games.
Couldn't disagree more. I cannot even imagine what someone who "speaks clearly and authentically albeit not in their mother tongue" might even sound like. It's just completely self-contradictory. Puzzling why anyone would even try to hugbox the topic away. It's a downright perverse and condescending way to try comfort people about their poor pronunciation skills. We [foreign speakers] don't put in decades of language learning effort just to then be handed the metaphorical equivalent of a participation trophy.
6:45 is a super weird take. Characters usually have thick accents when the VO is in English because you want it to feel like you're talking to somebody that is actually from the Chernobyl area but they learned enough English to communicate with you in English. If the VO sounds like the character is fresh off the streets of London or LA, it breaks some of the immersion. Unless, of course, the story was that a bunch of STALKERS just arrived from England or America.
Totally agree, thought voice actors should be from eastern Europe that speak english and not wester english speakers that fake the eastern europe accent. I think that was the point Alex was trying to make maybe.
disagree with your premise, maybe that is true in some cases, but in most cases the player character is explicitly from the same place as the NPC's and shares their accent so there would be no reason for them to be speaking to you in english. if you want to feel like youre talking to someone from the area, turn on the appropriate language and english subtitles
@@pondwhale Cuz "Foreigners secretly love us and humiliate themselves with thick accents no matter the scenario while the MC who is not as rooted in that country is easily comprehensible" is US headcanon, except when Ridley Scott tells them to worship the holy British accent in Gladiator. How is that not obvious to you?
I’ve not had one stutter in 7 hours, I’m not sure if they’re playing the day one patched version, it’s the only thing I can think. Edit I’m on the X btw
@@stephenmurray2851I get stutters on a 7800X3D so I would guess you just don't notice them as much while playing. Some ppl are more or less sensitive to it.
@@LEEROY_UK yes, i'm sure you're definitely not mistaken at all and you have a rare production version of the Series X that can play Stalker 2 with absolutely perfect framepacing.
This game, despite being a technological marvel in a sense, looks surprisingly incompetent in places. Like who thought that having no shadows from the flashlight is a worthy cut? Also, Alex be like, "Yo, let's have path tracing in a game that already runs like shite and pretty much requires image reconsteuction."
Devs said that the A-life engine is broken ATM, especially the AI spawnings randomlyaround you instead of actually wandring on the map like they should. They're aware and looking into it. Probably best to wait for that to be fixed, at minima.
@@PawnbandReally though. It’s like going to a furniture store and buying a dining room table and chairs, getting home only to find the chairs don’t have legs and the table falls over, then when you contact the store they tell you they’ll fix it in 6-12 months, maybe.
@@Pawnband One reason for that is that a lot of customers buy games at launching instead of waiting technical reviews. The studios know that so they don't care about technical issues until players complain.
Honestly It's frustrating to see new games with simple towns with few people being justifiable of such terrible CPU performance. Take a look to Assassins Creed Unity to see what is a bustling town and interactivity
I'm going to argue debatable on the "interactivity" element. The bustling is definitely impressive, Ubisoft and subsequently the industry failed Unity so badly, we could have had follow ups to Unity instead of the slop malaise that we've have gotten with more recent titles.
@@deetsitmeisterjd Agreed. There's not really a lot going on in the newer AC titles (with incredible simple AI profiles) and I'd say while Unity's density *is* impressive its scope certainly is a lot smaller compared to Stalker 2.
Unity has a lot of people walking around, but all AssCreed games NPC's are just doing that, walking and sitting around mumbling generic phrases. They aren't doing anything close to what a proper NPC in even Oblivion does. In-fact, if you want to compare it to something, compare it to Oblivion. It had NPC's which actually have a routine, can fight, talk, eat, sleep, have inventories, can pick up things and use them.
I disagree on the accents - while stereotypical overdone accents are bad obviously, I think that English with a normal localised accent is best. It’s weird when people from another time and/or place sound modern British or American.
The way this game and Dragon's Dogma 2 handles NPCs must be wildly different to games like Assassin's Creed. Where I remember the first game on Xbox 360 could have tons of NPCs on the screen at once without tanking the frame rate.
Yeah, Assassin's Creed npc is just roaming around, some npc have very simple dialogue interaction to the player and event/mission npc is scripted. So it is not comparable with this kind of game where the npc can "comunicate" with other npc with or without player interaction to them. There is opposite design, one type of game world is build around player without invisible processing and the other is simulating living world and put the player into it
Fallout NV, has NPC's loaded in regardless of how far away you go. & That game still runs 30 fps. & That game was made with the worst engine known to man. Lol
AC Unity comes to mind. They could have done the same here, and only activate AI when you interact with the NPCs or when something important happens. But what can you expect from incompetent hacks? Exactly, nothing!!
Or that one line that shout over and over I can't remember exactly right now but something like "I'm hiding over here". Why in the world would you ever shout something like that during a firefight lol.
@@Aradinx2 Yeah. Personally that's the most disappointing thing for me right now and has made me decide to wait and see if hopefully they improve all of that. From what I understand, currently spawning just works by having a fairly small bubble around the player in which the game will randomly spawn random NPC's/Enemies etc. But even that simple system is broken (or at least was at launch). There are countless gameplay videos of the game just spawning enemies right in front of the player. There seems to be no "A-life" type of system in STALKER 2. Or according to GSC they just shipped the game with it 100% broken. But I quickly noticed in after ~2 hours of gameplay. I very quickly noticed that when running around the encounters already felt very repetitive. 9 times out of 10 the game would very obviously spawn a pack of dogs near me and they would attack. Which is just a feeling I never have gotten with the OG games. So I checked the STALKER sub-reddit and sure enough it's full of posts about the awful spawning system and how currently basically the open world is completely dead outside of a bubble around the player. I fired up STALKER COP for a bit yesterday. Not long after I start playing I hear a pack of dogs in the distance, I take out and use my binoculars (which don't seem to be in STALKER 2 but dataminers did find references to them) and see a pack of dogs running in one direction in the distance. Because they were actually migrating from one part of the zone to another. Just a tiny example of what "A-life" did in the OG games. And something you'll never see in STALKER 2, at least in it's current state.
No dynamic shadows from flashlights is a disappointment. Also it needs a deadzone slider on console. The aiming is way too loose and touchy. That said, there's an amazing game here, it just needs some TLC.
In case of games built on UE5 I believe it’s over-reliance on built in engine toys such as Lumen, Nanite etc. While cool for presentations and general use in smaller games, they do completely tank performance in the real AAA-games, where besides few cool lightning effects and arguably better LOD system, there are also general shaders, simulation, physics, specific scripting and so on. We are experiencing awful performance because developers do not update their own engines, relying very heavily on pre-packaged solutions like UE5. And when it comes to debugging, the underlying issues with the engine are so deep and fundamental, that it is essentially becomes impossible to fix without rewriting the entire systems and abandoning core engine UE5 features.
considering they made this during life threatening conditions, it is quite impressive. cp2077 was the actual sin, with kids and their awesome comfort and benefits.
Would have been nice to hear if there was a difference in 16gb or 32gb memory. Some benchmarks i've seen show the game using over 22gb of memory even in 1080p medium settings.
@@arek314I don’t think it’s necessarily a memory leak. Sadly, Nanite is very memory intensive (both RAM and storage wise). It explains the 160gb file size as well
i spent a week in the actual zone in 2016 and i gotta say these games really do an awesome job conveying the atmosphere. it is clear that the first stalker (soc) visual style was more like early autumn while this one is more like end of summer. furthermore many of the locations are depicted in a very realistic manner. i still remember first arriving in pripyat's main square and realizing i know the layout and even some surrounding buildings. surreal. i am really looking forward to playing this one :)
I'd wager on AI when we're talking about CPU limitations. Even CSGO which is extremely easy to run could be CPU limited and tank the frame rate if you put 10 bots on a server.
@@EvilTim1911 Sure, but CSGO bots need to be running line checks for their vision and movement logic every frame. And the same for their pathing/navigation logic. The NPCs in Stalker 2 barely need any of that. Most of the time they are just standing still. If the performance cost is not primarily the skeletal deformations and animations, it seems it would be easy to optimize.
From what it seems like to me, it has something to do with memory management. Maybe utilizing some shortcuts in exchange for runtime performance penalties. It would make sense as to why they expect you to run this game with 32GBs of RAM.
It seems that I have only issues with UE5 games. I experience micro freezes and overall bad performance compared to other games. I have a R9 7950X3D with RTX 4090 and 32GB DDR5 6000MT/s. Non UE5 games run as they should for my system.
unfortunely frostbite engine was not good too. it was buttery smooth until co called this next gen games. you can start with burning fortnite but it cast shadows when burn lol.
@@xtr.7662 battlefield 2042 and dead space reamke espicaly on pc have problems. it first start with battlefield 5 with ray tracing before thay maybe best engine graphics with peformance.
6:43 funnily enough I was just talking to someone about this and we both agreed we’d have preferred the stereotypical accents. As an Englishman hearing us, Scots and Irish in what’s supposed to be Ukraine breaks my immersion like crazy. Has me thinking I’m playing Fallout London at times. 😂 Probably just gonna switch the language to Ukrainian but at the same time I cba reading subtitles the whole game. 💀
And it's only the beginning of what seems to be massive adoption from most devs, abandoning in-house engines in the process. I've heard that the upcoming 5.6 version is supposed to improve on the front of the traversal stutters. But I have a really hard time believing it. I will believe it when I see it in action. For now, I've never seen a UE5 open world game without stutters.
@@etienne1062 It'll be 'fine' if Epic fixes the engine, I suppose, aside from all games having a similar look. But if their history is anything to go by (their launcher STILL has a download speed issue that was present way back in 2017), I don't have high hopes. I miss games all using their own engine and having distinct graphical and feeling differences. Everything UE5 all the time is balls.
@@Cheynanigans__ I think that with a strong art direction, games can get past the ''generic UE5 look''. Jusant was an interesting example. Still, since the ultimate goal of UE5 is to streamline everything and to make development quicker, I am afraid that it will tend to make games look similar as a whole indeed. This consideration is secondary though, because the look of a game is not that important when it runs like garbage. And for now the majority of UE5 titles run like trash. Let's fix it first and see where it gets us. In the mean time it's up to us, consumers, to boycott subpar products.
Id say it will only get worse in the future. Epic Games doesn't give a single F. bout performance. And when you ask "what about performance?" in either their streams or on the forum, you get banned.
15:16 I don't think this somehow related to the npc count. For example in any modern rtx there are thouthands of units with navigation logic, but nothing is lagging. It is more likely that problem here is that all the npcs in the area are rendered and animated even though not all of them are visible. There was another game with the similar issue, which was fixed later, but it felt the same initially.
Thanks for coverage Alex, especially for pointing out missing flashlight shadows and aggressive trees lods. Those are really hurting the immersion and hopefully fix is on the way.
@@ANTANTANT360 Guys.. Google ”Stalker 2 mouse smoothing fix”. For some reason it’s a setting thats default/forced ON??? Instantly made everything feel 10x better after I turned it off, everything was just really off despite having locked 120fps before that… Running the same setup as you. Knew it was fking mouse smoothing when trying the game… in 2024 like COME ON devs haha
The lack of shadows from flashlight and campfires and muzzle flash was super jarring especially knowing these are all present in the original games x-ray engine and we are 20 years old newer hardware 😅😅😅
For frame cap ALWAYS use MSI afterburner/Riva SS - its the best implementation of the framerate cap ever. Ingame caps and nvidia caps are a childs toy compared to that. Why? Because when u use MSI it does not only limit the frames, it takes care of frame-pacing. So if a frame is rendered too fast, it will hold the frame and than insert it at milisecond precise moment. So if u for example cap it at 60fps, every frame will be rendered at same 16.6ms. Almost all games have it wrong.
I get the same from the Nvidia control panel. They've been interchangeable for a couple of years now. The few use cases I have found where it doesn't, neither does RIVA SS.
Unless you use "front edge sync" which gives you a one frame delay(and nearly perfect framepacing), rtss and nvidia control panel use very similar framecap technique
@@teamworkop3712 RTSS is still better, you can change the cap in real time, you can set a global cap and more importantly, in many cases, it works just better for me, producing a flat frame-time graph and reducing latency. It can add nvidia reflex to games which dont use reflex. U can customize the framerate to the decimals in RTSS, which is handy as well. Well... to each his own, I use RTSS and I think its superior, feature wise and results wise.
@@kamiz0 no mate, if you use VSYNC always use a RTSS frame cap at 60 at the same time, it reduces latency... that is if you not on VRR, but I had 60hz monitor, used VSYNC and always enabled 60fps cap in RTSS - than move your mouse and thank me later.
I'm tired of RT, DLSS and Frame generation. Its gaslighting the gaming industry. Newer graphics card can't handle the games natively and need the upscaling algorythm to even play the games. And thats fault of the new way of making games with UE5 (as an example) that let devs just throw assets and never optimize anything at all.
Tree LOD pop-in is truly obnoxious. Why the hell not use UE5 Nanite to mitigate this? AI is janky too with NPCs often intersecting world geometry and other NPCs. A lot of quest script logic is broken too leading to minor glitches as well as game-breaking bugs. Also, the most dangerous thing in the zone isn't anomalies or mutants, it's weapon reloads 😉
@@FordHoard Like Unity? There seems little engine options to choose from for a game of this scale. Maybe they really should have improved on their existing tech? Difficult decision.
iirc the earlier versions of UE5 that this game was built on dont support nanite vegetation, and its not trivial to port everything over to a newer version
My main issue with broken or unfinished games (for whatever reason) is that I don’t give you broken and unfinished money with the promise of an IOU. Devs take my perfectly good money and invest it in their perfectly good bank account. Devs don’t take 80% of the fee and then take the rest when they finish the game. So it’s not fair, it’s not an even playing field. So make a perfectly good game to honour peoples investment of perfectly good money.
This is the first game in years I haven't been able to run at 60FPS on my i7 9700K, RTX 3080 system. An upgrade is not in the plans any time soon though. I will just enjoy gameplay videos of this game. Because this literally runs like shit at its current state.
@@Szilagyicsabaistvan more than settings on pc rdr2 reducin grass distance on ini file help most. if you find smlilar forest grass setting on this game ini on pc reducing help ı guess but not smooth npc on village drop. those suggested settings on rdr2 also do nothing on towns espcialy city of game which heavly drop fps.
@@MrStrangermoon I was just playing Rdr2 not long ago. It runs like a dream compared to Stalker. Also, try reducing the Hair option to medium or low. It boosts FPS, especially in towns.
Unfinished Game Era 2014-2024... Can the consumers please get a break? It's very hot out here. If anybody feels attacked by this comment, just remember, I do not wish to attack you. You are free to love what you love, and when you choose to.
with foliage I wonder why didn't you mention half transparent dithered trees in the background and unmatching lod trees that pop into different trees when they get closer to camera, or sometimes super bright reflections of sky that is dark
The game also has an issue with a VRAM memory leak(?) or some kind of garbage collection issue after playing for extended periods. I have experienced this on both of my machines(5700x/4070ti & 7435hs/4070) where the amount of VRAM used will slowly increase until it maxes out and then performance will go from 70-100fps down to a powerpoint slide show of 8-10fps while maxing GPU utilization. Restarting the game is the only way to fix it and significantly lowers the amount of VRAM used in the same exact scene.
Yeah seems 2-3 hours and you gotta restart the game lol However after a restart Im running pretty damn smoothly for a while. Only had 1 hard lock/crash so far actually.
I just had a crazy memory leak I guess. But I wasn't even playing for that long (maybe 1 hour). Was playing just fine, and then the picture froze but audio continued. I pulled up task manager and my overall RAM usage was 99%. And I have 32GB of RAM! STALKER 2 was using ~26GB! It kept playing the audio of the game for a little bit and then the game crashed, as soon as the STALKER 2 process crashed my memory usage went down to ~20%.
You guys are like the last bastion on UA-cam for reasonable discussion and objective reviews. It feels like everybody else is just yelling at everything all the time.
@@Dan-si8fp They were giving it honest critiques and then all of a sudden it was all overly positive talking points the honesty of all their prior criticisms stopped. It seems once IGN bought them they are afraid to do honest critiques on Sony items.
I'm essentially running one of the most powerful builds you can get today (7950X 3D paired with 4090) and this game still tanks my system, even dropping everything from Epic to High. However, I have not tried the framerate cap. Looking forward to seeing what that does.
@@Phil_529 for what it’s worth I tried it out and it crashed after 5 minutes two times. That’s the only setting I changed. Bumped it back up to uncapped and stopped crashing, lol
This is a game where I just wonder why there appears to have studio bias . The critique uses such soft language and carefully crafted comments compared to when black myth wukong was reviewed and when it was discussed. I'd say black myth wukong performed better, was much more technically competent and polished, yet it was much more harshly reviewed. It seems like it's the typical "China is bad" and "Ukraine can do no wrong." I'm a fan of both games but my goodness, there is a giant difference in tone when discussing certain studios and games. With that being said, I still think the reviews are very competent, highly educational, and professional. Its just an appearance of studio bias that I notice in reviews in recent years.
Well, one of those games was made during a freaking war. I think you can give that studio a bit of leeway, while fairly criticizing the game's shortcomings.
@tyrus1235 that isn't relevant. I am not criticisng the game or the studio but pointing out the way DF has been overly critical with games that are technically and performantly better than other games they dance around their wording. Its not just this game. Even some indy games like No rest for the wicked (i think is the name). I got the early access game based on their review and it was wrong and misleading. The studio basically was getting sold off from the publisher right after they were saying it was one of the best games they have played and it's only gonna get way better in early access.
I don't think this would be something that DF does (maybe it is) but I would love to see a deep dive on why the NPCs are so heavy on the CPU in a very specific and detailed way. To understand how threaded something like that is, and how adding more NPCs affects it, and all of the different things it must be checking constantly to be occupying CPU cycles so heavily. I know nothing about how game development works, so I would love to see a deep dive exploring how, down to how each line of code, it affects CPU performance, and what features when programmed in, are the heaviest (and things like that).
I have a problem on Xbox sx in this game. It is like there is no dead zone on sticks on Xbox controller. I tried to play on two gamepads and nothing changes. Is it only my problem? No one talks about that, how to fix this?
This has been confirmed by the devs and is in the pipeline for a fix. I had to put my sensitivity all the way up to help with this. Also, the stick drift is reeeaaalllyyyy bad.
@@rizunifywith dlss on quality...... Imagine spending that much on a PC for it to run at 35-40 FPS it is honestly extremely laughable i'm ngl..... Devs nowadays release their shitty optimized and unfinished games and expect us to pay full 70 dollars for it
@@TechnoSiD25 The NPCs are already few in number and low in reactivity/complexity, dialing them down basically mean removing them from the game altogether! 😆
Its all so tiresome. Every game these days has an official launch and then a real launch when its actually playable. They should have called this early access.
I'm really surprised by not seeing any mention of the ridiculous amount of shimmering that show up on screen when you turn upscalers and TAA off and how much smearing and ghosting there is with TAA on. I can't get a clear image in this game no matter what I do and it's really annoying. Things only look good when I'm standing still. I expected a mention of it at least.
Digital foundry seem to love DLSS and TAA. Anything temporal that turns what should be sharp 4k into a blurry mess the second you move the mouse. Never seen digital foundry call it out.
@@HoneyTwee I know but I thought they would call it out in this game. I use DLSS all the time and in no other game it has looked this bad for me. Even with DLSR or DSR+DLAA it looks like shit.
@@onurkaya167 I've not actually managed to launch the game yet since launch, too busy. But terrible TAA isn't uncommon. The worst example I can think of is red dead 2. So I'll have to see how it compares to that.
This game is a broken mess on Series X the lighting sucks the performance sucks the movement and controls has noticable judder the textures are low quality there is no immersion in this game I'm disappointed I'll check it out again next year hopefully it's patched and fixed by the then
For people on PC that want to force motion blur scaling by changing it in the config file: Go to: " Users\'change to user'\AppData\Local\Stalker2\Saved\GameSettings " and make changes in the "AppliedSettings.cfg" -> "MotionBlurScale = 1.0"
For game pass version: C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\Local\Stalker2\Saved\GameSettings\AppliedSettings.cfg There should be a “motionblurscale=1” setting, however increasing the number from 1 to 2 or 3, didn’t visually changed anything on my end. Not 100% sure if this is the solution Alex was mentioning.
I have to disagree on the English voice acting. It's good but the accents from the old STALKER games were a big part of the charm, spawning iconic lines like "Get out of here Stalker", and "I said come in, don't stand there". The good middle ground would be to have varied accents, it would also be more authentic and diverse.
Kinda doesn't matter. SoC and CoP are the standout ones, and SoC came first. Clear Sky doesn't hold up so well. There are many great heavy modded versions about which are worth using after the initial play throughs.
Been excited for this game since pre-this gen launch trailer. Didn't play Stalker1. With 2, I am playing on Series S and PC--while the game is quite surprising on Series S (really, it looks good and has a stable 30), but I am fortunate enough to have a PC that will run the game at 100+fps on Epic, and there is a significant improvement. After the patches, the game does not suffer from those crazy bugs other, earlier reviews mentioned. My biggest wish? Muzzle flash and other lights being able to cast shadows. I agree with Alex that for a 2007 game, those features made Stalker 1 very impressive, and I would love to see that feature implemented with such high assets that are in 2. Give us muzzle flash and fire shadow casting! :D Great game so far. Edit: I play on a gaming laptop, so running at 1080p using the built in monitor is why I'm getting 100+fps. rtx 4070, 64GB DDR5, i7 processor (not sure the speed).
@@Radek494they moved to Czechia after the war. Also a lot of the employees remained in Ukraine. Also take the office fire and the hacking into account
@@fllmerpit is not an excuse but an explanation. It is completely understandable that there are performance issues in a UE5 game, the series of which is known for jank, all while having to relocate your employees to another country and make an office there, survive an office fire and defend your files from being hacked.
I think people should stop comparing Metro (a linear shooter) with a game such as Stalker 2 (a persistent open world across a 60KM+ square mile map with dynamic weather. Just because some ex GSC devs worked on Metro, and the vibe is similar does not warrant direct comparison. Stalker 2 has a range of issues that, lets be honest, were expected by anyone who has seen releases in the last few years. We can all get top end CPUs and 4090 GPUs and there will still be limitations at the development level as games are overcomplex and seem to be designed to rely on upscalers to run. That being said, I am enjoying Stalker 2 so far, it was free on GamePass so I have no reason to be salty. And if I get tired of it, I'll just go back to the GAMMA mod!
Calling Metro linear is a bit of injustice to the open sandbox 'levels' that are there. It feels open world. I will play Stalker 2 but in at least 12 months time, which is my approach for all new games!
@environm3ntalist549 I didn't mean it in a negative way. Just pointing out the differences in the flow of the game. I haven't played the most recent Metro but my understanding was that once you completed a level then you would not be able to go back to it (to make new discoveries etc), so I class that as linear as you are only moving forward. They are beautiful in atmosphere though and few games got my adrenaline pumping than having a cracked gas mask while being assaulted by flying monstrosities 😂
@@Grieva-SeeD- you are right of course in terms of forward progression. Those 'levels' are big and worldy though. Feels like 4 or 5 worlds in 1 at times.
@@Trickzter1337 I agree with the point you are making here. I have a 5800x3D and a 6700xt. I don't expect miracles and I get a reasonable experience. It's a new game and each year that passes my hardware gets less competent at modern releases. There are some serious optimisations that are needed here though, I'm sure we can all agree on that.
@@CatLover_69 Right, one of the few (more or less 4) channels YT that tests and points out technical issues rushes their videos. If only they were like the plethora of reviewers who take their time so they can say their useless opinion about a game. DF could release 3 videos on this game within the same week, including an optimized setting video, and people like you wouldn't be satisfied.
A vast amount of input lag is caused by mouse smoothing. Which you can disable via Input.ini. Googling "stalker 2 disable mouse smoothing" will get you the _how_.
@@colonelmoeitz9855 Not sure if it's the same as Alex used: under C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Stalker2\Saved\Config\WinGDK - GameUserSettings.ini - set sg.MotionBlurQuality=3
@@dentalnecrothe video literally shows it running poorly, meanwhile you are stating otherwise. The classic "run fine on my system". You don't have a special, unique xbox that magically runs it better than for everyone else.
Its nice to see Digital Foundry and the lads are making the switch to Bluesky. Excellent video as always! Looking forward to the continued improvement of this game!
This game is not finished. A-life 2.0 is absolutely broken - if not completely non-existent. They should not have released this game yet. This is so disappointing.
Sometimes it feels like you guys are actually the only ones who do great technical coverage of games, from everyone else it just boils down to oh it run bad.
They are
They’re the best in the business
It really is.
You don’t need an hour long DF video to tell you the performance is crap, a 4090 is 1080p card in this game.
@JesuSoup "Oh it Run Bad" is all you need to know. You don't need to be rocket scientist to figure that out 😂
No shadows from campfires, flashlights or muzzleflashes is a grave sin in my eyes
It's CRRRAAAZZZZYYYY. How are they not in this game
Unreal engine treatment
OG Metro 2033 from 2010 looks stunning compared to this. I hate unreal engine 5.
Yeah it's a bit lame.
@@FordHoardI mean you can have all those things in unreal5, for some reason devs struggle with implementing it
Wouldnt be an UE5 game without questionable CPU performance
nanite + lumen have a huge cpu cost
@xtr.7662 nanite also only seems to beat traditional LOD and Tesselation at 75% quad overdraw in a scene which is insanely bad. In General UE isnt really "performant" in its current state and even 5.5 doesnt change that
As soon as I saw it's outdated thick SSAO artifacts i knew Stalker 2 would be a hard pass for me. Also the usual unreal engine issues are unpleasant. To me the only impressive next gen rt game tech so far is The Callisto Protocol. The game devs dismissed the build in UE4 rt features and implemented a custom solution and it shows. With the PS5 pro patch the game runs even in 8k with full ray tracing and looks way better than so many new UE5 games.
@@xtr.7662 The game is not using Nanite.
@@xtr.7662 They do. I have a 4090 and Fortnite maxed out graphic settings with nanite and lumen at 3440x1440 barely gets over 100 fps most of the time.
No Flashlight shadows is such a bummer
Weird, must be an anomaly.
Yeah that don't make no sense.. I wonder if that's a bug, or something they had to turn off to try to fix a bug? Like I'm not saying go the Half-Life 2 route where you break everything else in order to get flashlight shadows lol.. But like.. Man the the dynamicentially lighting for stalker was like kind of the that was like the clenching core that made it look good, and made the underground look amazing.
This is like this feels like kind of like you missed the bushes for the trees or something I don't know.. or is it the trunks for the leaves? Or wait like maybe it's just way too much grass for the trees? Like I'm I'm not making this work.. Little details matter, bigger details don't nearly as much especially when an absence of those little details that help sell your world. I mean I guess the modern game really doesn't care but like you know I do.. and so I'm going to complain about it, cuz you know that's that's really all I can do other than mods which I already am going to do and already have to do for most games nowadays lol.
If no one mentioned this couple days ago, no one would give a F.
Doom3 has that effect and it released tenmillion years ago.
Literally unplayable, just like Dying light 2.
No flashlight and muzzleflash shadows is a joke compared to the og. We’re in the future guys, get with it.
Push them to add hardware Lumen sooner!
Hell Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition has these. Considering how performant that game is and how amazing it looks, I wish more developers designed their lighting around infinite-bounce RTGI.
@@davidbondy2250 Exodus looks 100000x better than this. Objectively. AND ITS A PERFECT 60fps WITH RT. ........ -_- UE5 is a joke.
@@simonrockstream Well Exodus was coded by OG STALKER devs who left GSC after they made Xray and the first game..
@@davidbondy2250 OG Metro 2033 from 2010 has muzzleflash shadows. It looks amazing still.
Makes you really appreciate what Rockstar were able to achieve with RDR2.
When you watch all those tech demos, where they showcase all the new advanced game engine tools that are supposed to simplify and speed up game development and improve performance. Why do these UE5 games feel like the quality is regressing? Is it the tools or have all the talent left the industry that would know how to leverage the tools? I get that in Stalkers 2 case it's a CPU bound game, which is why it tanks performance. But just speaking about AAA games in general, feels like they've taken 3 steps back to take I step forward.
My first thought is that a lot of companies hedged too many bets on UE5 without a comprehensive understanding of it's limitations, or without respect for the engineering acumen that is still required to make good game, UE5 or otherwise. But that doesn't explain the degradation in quality in other franchises, even very large and successful ones that still use their own in-house developer tools. Call of Duty comes to mind here, as it's technical quality peaked in 2019 with Modern Warfare (that game was one of the most beautiful games I've ever seen and ran great) and the subsequent releases have regressed since then. I think across the board it's just becoming more difficult to attain the skilled labor needed for the complex engineering work of modern game development. Even the largest companies are having trouble, it would seem. The problem would be even more challenging for smaller companies to navigate.
Well, you have to consider that RDR2 had a dev team of approx. 2000 people, roughly 10x the size of GSC. Not really a fair comparison.
tbh im sure GTA6 wouldnt have that difference like GTA5 vs RDR2. graphics peaked in 8th gen
why is it cpu bound?
Game scope has massively increased, more experienced devs who defined the 2000s era are slowly retiring and companies are ignoring optimization at an attempt to please investors, while also having CEOs who only care about short term profit over game quality and long term profit.
Dice is a prime example where the majority of the senior devs left after BF1 and a lot of the ones still there left after BFV and the result was 2042.
the NPCs destroy performance but barely do anything interesting either, what the hell is it even using the CPU for when all they do mostly is stand or sit somewhere, compare that to something like RDR2, NPCs in that are so much more interactive, reactive and dynamic, and they had that running on the ancient ps4 cpu
And if the whole AI system is nowhere near as robust as original Stalker as people are reporting, then game suffering when NPC's are in play even when doing basic things is very questionable.
It does feel like we’re going backwards. You make a great point. RD2 is much better.
iirc RDR2 was extremely CPU intensive when it was released.
rdr2 on pc smilar hardware on ps4 xbox one when you come town fps drop drmaticly when you come city it drops 10fps. on open areas good if you reduce grass. elden ring also reducing grass smooth things making grass medium instead of high. new consoles on pefromace mode elden ring grass lows thats why peformance mod every other settings kinda same. if you make grass high on performance mod the resolsation cut not enough.
@@hankhillsdisappointedsighnot enough to 6 second pause lock a ps4 😂
Why is there no environmental muzzle flash lighting in a dark game with good HDR implementation in 2024? It is extremely immersion breaking.
A very strange omission! I'm sure they're aware of it too
@@piotr78their is multiple missing graphical elements that ruin the atmosphere in this game
I also thought it was weird how it is missing muzzle flash and flashlight shadows, they added a lot to OG STALKER's visuals.
It was back in trailers, everyone was talking about it, don't think they are going to fix it
Metro 2033 had it, killzone 2 had it, hell left 4 dead even...
Damn performance on this generation is just laughable across the board! Am I the only one who thinks Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition looks better than this game while also running perfectly smooth?
It does! Absolutly! I wanted to play Stalker 2 this weekend. Now I will play Metro exodus and will come back to Stalker in about 2 years.
Yeah, it runs on high settings and 144 fps in my laptop with a 4050. It’s incredible how well they did that game. And it cost like 5€
It looks better in every single way
It looks absolutely amazing imo. Idk why is everyone talking sh1t about this game.. Texture quality and vegetation quality/density look absolutely stunning and I’ve never seen a game looking this good. Sure, there are things like missing muzzle and flashlight shadows and that definitely sucks but I still think the game looks amazing. People talk sh1t because they get bad performance on their 6 years old hardware..
@belec5964 No, people talk sh*t because even on the best hardware, with "cheating" by using frame generation and DLSS, they barely get 60fps and even that has dips. And this game is NOT that impressive. This isn't Crysis from 2007. It's not mind blowing, it's not doing anything new. It's just poorly optimized. In fact, Crysis STILL does a lot more than this game does lmao.
The developers did an interview back in October saying the game could drop to 55 fps on the Xbox Series X during intense combat and also discussed the possibility of bringing 60 fps to the Xbox Series S. I honestly expected it to launch in better condition after reading that.
Nothing against the devs whatsoever (I know this game was made in very difficult conditions), but after Cyberpunk and console PUBG, I never trust comments about performance before launch lol. I think most people have forgotten that Brenden Greene said PUBG was hitting 45 FPS on Xbox One, and 60 on the One X, only for the game to release and often run in the teens despite looking worse than many PS2 and OG Xbox games lol
They've already said they're gonna be updating it a lot with free content..so i'm sure it'll gwt better in the coming months, oh well
The bugs were expected. They're almost a feature of this franchise lol. The important thing is that the game is good content-wise. The bugs should be ironed out with a few patches. Nothing against the devs. They did good. This is an old school game and a welcome change these days.
i think this version of the game is in the pipeline and the publishers gave us an earlier release that's more content complete, lol
Considering it’s a dense open world UE5 title, that remembers where you drop anything like a Bethesda title on top of it, I’m actually surprised it runs as well as it does considering how punishing this engine has been on console so far, and that image quality is this good. The consoles are aging. I’m sure they’ll get there, but I would have been shocked if this was a locked 60 or even close to it at launch without severe image degredation.
I played original stalker on PC and enjoyed it but it's irritating to see people accepting poor optimisation coz the original was poorly optimised.
“That’s part of the stalker charm”
Uummm no…that’s VERY poor optimization. PERIOD
I feel the same way about Bethesda games and their fans lol
@@AnEyeRacky fr
Almost all games have “poor optimization” at launch now.
Welcome to modern gaming. It will be fixed in the coming years.
The only one of the original trilogy that came as poorly optimized (as stalker 2) is Clear Sky. And it still can be explained by the fact that it was pretty advanced when it came out(16y ago btw) and out of the 3 is the best looking, yet unstable(talking about vanilla ofc, no mods). None of that applies to stalker 2, it's looks good(expect the lighting, but that's only on some spots) but nothing ground breaking
It’s bugged, but I’ve been playing for 5 hours now and I’m immersed. One thing I liked was I haven’t come across any texture pop-in, unlike Silent Hill 2 Remake that I finished last week. The frame rate is far from locked. It’s also way too dark so you gotta play around with the brightness in the settings.
I like the game also, but the game needs to be better optimized. About visuals, are nice, but nothing that we haven´t seen. I hate UE engines! I have a nice PC with a 4080s, play only at 1440p, but I do not like the frametime i´m getting and the FPS.
Haven't come across any texture pop-in? In the first minute of the game I experienced trees popping in and an anomaly popping in as I drew closer. Literally the first area after the first cutscene, the blue glowing pillars and trees were popping in as I walked close.
@@kohlwalushka yeah, my bad, it just happened to me now while playing. The entire forest popped in after loading a save 😅
They overtuned the darkness trying to be like the original games.
You know you have a flashlight?😄😉
I would love a video from you on why modern titles nowadays are often CPU limited from a technical view even though there's not much more going on.
More background systems, logic and calculations than older games and also, newer games definitely tend to be more OW with alot more NPC’s on screen than a lot older games.
bcouse they are early acces now. until 2020 pc games also coming physcal format. not like every one claiming pchyscal pc games gone on 2013s with steam rise. since 2020 with cyberpunk you can see dramatic problems on even pc. mostly due to now there is no dead line to press disc so bascily they are early access like games no need to critcal day one patch if there is no disc relase.
@@jose131991 not true look at ac unity streets its almost full of people you cant walk strait even and city is huge. now other games 6 npc drop frame on small village lol.
@MrStrangermoon I'm not an expert at lot, but when it comes to STALKER2 specificaly it's could be caused by nanite and Metahumans. At least from what I've heard, nanite is great to display insane amount of poligons, buts it better to have every object in scene using this feature. Because activating nanite comes with its own overhead. So if you have half of objects are not using it - you still have overhead if CPU-time, and sometimes it makes framerate even lower than scene with fully off nanite.
Also, metahumans looks CPU demanding.
It's kinda unfortunate that some issues of the engine was patched only in later versions. Like nanite for fooliage in UE5.2 (or UE5.3). And metahumans optimizations in latest UE5.5. Really interesting how it could performs and looks if they started development now on UE5.5.
At least, there are possibilities to optimize their custom logic and code, and also take some source code from UE5.5 to make current game run better and support features that UE5.1 didn't when they're switched from UE4.
@@now_ever ue5 game stray souls use metahuman and peformace not drop even budget pc. dont think meta humans cause that.
muzzle flash and dynamic torchlight need to be added
don't worry if the devs won't add it, mods will😂
@@draco2xx When?
Fun fact, the motion capture director for the cutscenes in this is Ilya Naishyller, the director of Hardcore Henry and Nobody!
That’s really cool!
Thats sick, no wonder cutscene look great.
@ agreed, and each one has a uniqueness about it, like a lot of them have a surreal-like feeling that reminds me of the weirdness of Hardcore Henry.
Mocap is quite good all round, as is the facial animation and lip-sync. Compare this to the minimum-viable-effort I see in Dragon Age: Veilguard and this small publisher and dev team puts everyone at EA to shame.
@ It’s even more impressive that the lips sync according to the localization.
I’ve never ONCE seen that in a game.
One point I'd disagree on - and this is a personal preference: I'd actually prefer if the English language audio was spoken by someone with a 'local' accent. At least, it's far more jarring for me to hear, say, a random American accent out of context than Ukrainian-accented voices speaking English. Again, personal preference. There are people all over the world that speak clearly and authentically albeit not in their mother tongue. Nothing wrong with hearing them, if not done by ham actors of course.
Yeah I agree, AC unity was so weird
Me too its very jarring hearing someone sound like they are from upstate new york as a Ukrainian stalker
@@adamvose2651well most Ukrainians would be not speaking English anyways. I suggest Ukrainian audio with English subs
I concur. Though I agree with Alex that playing with the Ukranian dialog would _technically_ be the superior option, I don't speak Ukranian, so I would need to turn on subtitles. Personally, I don't enjoy playing games or watching films while staring at a bunch of immersion-ruining text at the bottom of the screen most of the time instead of actually paying attention to what's happening on screen. I find the argument that the player character wouldn't perceive the accents to be a bit absurd, as they wouldn't perceive English either. I get that he was trying to equate it to something akin to native understanding, but personally I find the use of accents to be an acceptable compromise between the immersion of the proper language and the ability to actually understand what is being said without reading a bunch of text. If I wanted to read, I'd reach for a book, not play video games.
Couldn't disagree more. I cannot even imagine what someone who "speaks clearly and authentically albeit not in their mother tongue" might even sound like. It's just completely self-contradictory. Puzzling why anyone would even try to hugbox the topic away. It's a downright perverse and condescending way to try comfort people about their poor pronunciation skills. We [foreign speakers] don't put in decades of language learning effort just to then be handed the metaphorical equivalent of a participation trophy.
22:00 the drops under 40fps here with 7800X3D and 4090 are quite concerning 😅 CPU performance is rough ugh
Not to mention he Alex had DLSS set to ultra performance to achieve such wonderful framerates.
he is a pc meat rider so he leaves stuff out
@@lawnmanGmanooohh cool, petty childish tribalism, how mature
Getting the same performance on 7800x3d and 4070ti on the low end. It's the CPU getting HAMMERED
i9 13900K here, 4090, 64gb 5600 DDR5. Runs fine for me.
6:45 is a super weird take. Characters usually have thick accents when the VO is in English because you want it to feel like you're talking to somebody that is actually from the Chernobyl area but they learned enough English to communicate with you in English. If the VO sounds like the character is fresh off the streets of London or LA, it breaks some of the immersion. Unless, of course, the story was that a bunch of STALKERS just arrived from England or America.
Totally agree, thought voice actors should be from eastern Europe that speak english and not wester english speakers that fake the eastern europe accent. I think that was the point Alex was trying to make maybe.
disagree with your premise, maybe that is true in some cases, but in most cases the player character is explicitly from the same place as the NPC's and shares their accent so there would be no reason for them to be speaking to you in english. if you want to feel like youre talking to someone from the area, turn on the appropriate language and english subtitles
Its a "weird" take? What does that even mean?
nailed it with this comment
@@pondwhale Cuz "Foreigners secretly love us and humiliate themselves with thick accents no matter the scenario while the MC who is not as rooted in that country is easily comprehensible" is US headcanon, except when Ridley Scott tells them to worship the holy British accent in Gladiator. How is that not obvious to you?
a six *second* stutter when entering the town on Series X.... i thought performance on my 5800X3D was bad...
I’ve not had one stutter in 7 hours, I’m not sure if they’re playing the day one patched version, it’s the only thing I can think. Edit I’m on the X btw
@@LEEROY_UKthis always happens. They say there are problems then when I play I never have any of it.
@@stephenmurray2851I get stutters on a 7800X3D so I would guess you just don't notice them as much while playing. Some ppl are more or less sensitive to it.
that's why nobody will remember you
@@LEEROY_UK yes, i'm sure you're definitely not mistaken at all and you have a rare production version of the Series X that can play Stalker 2 with absolutely perfect framepacing.
the non-shadow casting lights also seem to cast self shadows, just not onto the world, how strange.
it genuinely might be bugged rn lol
@@cacomeat7385it was showcased like this
This game, despite being a technological marvel in a sense, looks surprisingly incompetent in places. Like who thought that having no shadows from the flashlight is a worthy cut? Also, Alex be like, "Yo, let's have path tracing in a game that already runs like shite and pretty much requires image reconsteuction."
Why is it so CPU intensive? The NPCs are dumb as a rock
Devs said that the A-life engine is broken ATM, especially the AI spawnings randomlyaround you instead of actually wandring on the map like they should. They're aware and looking into it. Probably best to wait for that to be fixed, at minima.
Bad programming.
@@deadgoroth2581 It sucks that gaming is one of the few industries where you can release a broken product to the public with no consequences.
@@PawnbandReally though. It’s like going to a furniture store and buying a dining room table and chairs, getting home only to find the chairs don’t have legs and the table falls over, then when you contact the store they tell you they’ll fix it in 6-12 months, maybe.
@@Pawnband One reason for that is that a lot of customers buy games at launching instead of waiting technical reviews. The studios know that so they don't care about technical issues until players complain.
Honestly It's frustrating to see new games with simple towns with few people being justifiable of such terrible CPU performance. Take a look to Assassins Creed Unity to see what is a bustling town and interactivity
I'm going to argue debatable on the "interactivity" element.
The bustling is definitely impressive, Ubisoft and subsequently the industry failed Unity so badly, we could have had follow ups to Unity instead of the slop malaise that we've have gotten with more recent titles.
@@deetsitmeisterjd Agreed. There's not really a lot going on in the newer AC titles (with incredible simple AI profiles) and I'd say while Unity's density *is* impressive its scope certainly is a lot smaller compared to Stalker 2.
Unity has a lot of people walking around, but all AssCreed games NPC's are just doing that, walking and sitting around mumbling generic phrases. They aren't doing anything close to what a proper NPC in even Oblivion does.
In-fact, if you want to compare it to something, compare it to Oblivion. It had NPC's which actually have a routine, can fight, talk, eat, sleep, have inventories, can pick up things and use them.
@@deetsitmeisterjd STALKER 2 is a slop too
"buzzling" made me laugh out loud.
I disagree on the accents - while stereotypical overdone accents are bad obviously, I think that English with a normal localised accent is best. It’s weird when people from another time and/or place sound modern British or American.
So far my only real gripe in terms of presentation is software Lumen. I want the hardware RT ASAP.
The way this game and Dragon's Dogma 2 handles NPCs must be wildly different to games like Assassin's Creed. Where I remember the first game on Xbox 360 could have tons of NPCs on the screen at once without tanking the frame rate.
Yeah, Assassin's Creed npc is just roaming around, some npc have very simple dialogue interaction to the player and event/mission npc is scripted. So it is not comparable with this kind of game where the npc can "comunicate" with other npc with or without player interaction to them. There is opposite design, one type of game world is build around player without invisible processing and the other is simulating living world and put the player into it
Fallout NV, has NPC's loaded in regardless of how far away you go. & That game still runs 30 fps. & That game was made with the worst engine known to man. Lol
AC Unity comes to mind. They could have done the same here, and only activate AI when you interact with the NPCs or when something important happens. But what can you expect from incompetent hacks? Exactly, nothing!!
Man i’m so happy to see weapon
jamming. It’s something i would love to see in many survival games. Reminds me of far cry 2
Always reminds me of Jagged Alliance :D
durability is a staple in stalker
Weapon jamming is fine. Firing sixty shot and your gun breaks is complete idiocy. And look at that, Mods already fixed it. Dumb developers.
"Target lost, at ease" in the middle of a gunfight is so immersion breaking.
Almost as bad as the game just dropping enemies on your head randomly or being spotted through solid walls while sneaking.
Or that one line that shout over and over I can't remember exactly right now but something like "I'm hiding over here". Why in the world would you ever shout something like that during a firefight lol.
@@Aradinx2 Yeah. Personally that's the most disappointing thing for me right now and has made me decide to wait and see if hopefully they improve all of that. From what I understand, currently spawning just works by having a fairly small bubble around the player in which the game will randomly spawn random NPC's/Enemies etc. But even that simple system is broken (or at least was at launch). There are countless gameplay videos of the game just spawning enemies right in front of the player. There seems to be no "A-life" type of system in STALKER 2. Or according to GSC they just shipped the game with it 100% broken. But I quickly noticed in after ~2 hours of gameplay. I very quickly noticed that when running around the encounters already felt very repetitive. 9 times out of 10 the game would very obviously spawn a pack of dogs near me and they would attack. Which is just a feeling I never have gotten with the OG games. So I checked the STALKER sub-reddit and sure enough it's full of posts about the awful spawning system and how currently basically the open world is completely dead outside of a bubble around the player. I fired up STALKER COP for a bit yesterday. Not long after I start playing I hear a pack of dogs in the distance, I take out and use my binoculars (which don't seem to be in STALKER 2 but dataminers did find references to them) and see a pack of dogs running in one direction in the distance. Because they were actually migrating from one part of the zone to another. Just a tiny example of what "A-life" did in the OG games. And something you'll never see in STALKER 2, at least in it's current state.
This game has so much potential
Yeah hopefully it all gets sorted by the time the ps port is released
@@ddp5406 Thought they said it wasn't coming to PS?
@@ddp5406It's not coming to PS at all, never
@@Odie50000 Initially, but the port is slated for a couple of months.
@@Odie50000Why wouldn’t it?
No dynamic shadows from flashlights is a disappointment. Also it needs a deadzone slider on console. The aiming is way too loose and touchy. That said, there's an amazing game here, it just needs some TLC.
New games are terrible if we are speaking about performance farming 25, stalker 2, flight simulator 24 what’s wrong with this world
In case of games built on UE5 I believe it’s over-reliance on built in engine toys such as Lumen, Nanite etc.
While cool for presentations and general use in smaller games, they do completely tank performance in the real AAA-games, where besides few cool lightning effects and arguably better LOD system, there are also general shaders, simulation, physics, specific scripting and so on.
We are experiencing awful performance because developers do not update their own engines, relying very heavily on pre-packaged solutions like UE5. And when it comes to debugging, the underlying issues with the engine are so deep and fundamental, that it is essentially becomes impossible to fix without rewriting the entire systems and abandoning core engine UE5 features.
Flight sim gets a pass imo its pretty well optimized for what it is, any game with its scope is gonna need a beefy cpu
rich people across the world are going into hiding cause they believe ww3 is incoming so im guessing all the devs are now in hiding as well
considering they made this during life threatening conditions, it is quite impressive. cp2077 was the actual sin, with kids and their awesome comfort and benefits.
Would have been nice to hear if there was a difference in 16gb or 32gb memory. Some benchmarks i've seen show the game using over 22gb of memory even in 1080p medium settings.
I saw that too, looks like memory leak more than anything else. The worst one is when upgrading weapons, had freeze that way.
I have 64GB of Ram and the game has used 43% of my total Ram at times.
@@arek314I don’t think it’s necessarily a memory leak. Sadly, Nanite is very memory intensive (both RAM and storage wise). It explains the 160gb file size as well
@@GravityGames15that’s ridiculous
@@jimby812 yeah, it's also possible. I pity anyone running that game with 16 GB RAM
i spent a week in the actual zone in 2016 and i gotta say these games really do an awesome job conveying the atmosphere. it is clear that the first stalker (soc) visual style was more like early autumn while this one is more like end of summer. furthermore many of the locations are depicted in a very realistic manner. i still remember first arriving in pripyat's main square and realizing i know the layout and even some surrounding buildings. surreal. i am really looking forward to playing this one :)
What specifically is it about the NPCs that put such a load on the CPU? Is it the skeletal mesh deformations, or the path-finding/behavior logic?
I'd wager on AI when we're talking about CPU limitations. Even CSGO which is extremely easy to run could be CPU limited and tank the frame rate if you put 10 bots on a server.
@@EvilTim1911 Sure, but CSGO bots need to be running line checks for their vision and movement logic every frame. And the same for their pathing/navigation logic. The NPCs in Stalker 2 barely need any of that. Most of the time they are just standing still. If the performance cost is not primarily the skeletal deformations and animations, it seems it would be easy to optimize.
@@coldscooterThey not "stand" they running and explore zone and react on mutant !
From what it seems like to me, it has something to do with memory management. Maybe utilizing some shortcuts in exchange for runtime performance penalties. It would make sense as to why they expect you to run this game with 32GBs of RAM.
They lead rich inner lives.
somebody should burn this unreal 5 engine to the ground
It seems that I have only issues with UE5 games. I experience micro freezes and overall bad performance compared to other games. I have a R9 7950X3D with RTX 4090 and 32GB DDR5 6000MT/s. Non UE5 games run as they should for my system.
There's a youtuber called Threat Interactive doing that
unfortunely frostbite engine was not good too. it was buttery smooth until co called this next gen games. you can start with burning fortnite but it cast shadows when burn lol.
@@MrStrangermoon frostbite is amazing what are you smoking
@@xtr.7662 battlefield 2042 and dead space reamke espicaly on pc have problems. it first start with battlefield 5 with ray tracing before thay maybe best engine graphics with peformance.
6:43 funnily enough I was just talking to someone about this and we both agreed we’d have preferred the stereotypical accents.
As an Englishman hearing us, Scots and Irish in what’s supposed to be Ukraine breaks my immersion like crazy. Has me thinking I’m playing Fallout London at times. 😂
Probably just gonna switch the language to Ukrainian but at the same time I cba reading subtitles the whole game. 💀
@@PepeLa_ I honestly thought when I heard the English that it is hysterically bad.
Getting mighty tired of all this UE5 fuckery
And it's only the beginning of what seems to be massive adoption from most devs, abandoning in-house engines in the process.
I've heard that the upcoming 5.6 version is supposed to improve on the front of the traversal stutters. But I have a really hard time believing it.
I will believe it when I see it in action.
For now, I've never seen a UE5 open world game without stutters.
@@etienne1062 It'll be 'fine' if Epic fixes the engine, I suppose, aside from all games having a similar look. But if their history is anything to go by (their launcher STILL has a download speed issue that was present way back in 2017), I don't have high hopes. I miss games all using their own engine and having distinct graphical and feeling differences. Everything UE5 all the time is balls.
@@Cheynanigans__ I think that with a strong art direction, games can get past the ''generic UE5 look''. Jusant was an interesting example.
Still, since the ultimate goal of UE5 is to streamline everything and to make development quicker, I am afraid that it will tend to make games look similar as a whole indeed.
This consideration is secondary though, because the look of a game is not that important when it runs like garbage. And for now the majority of UE5 titles run like trash.
Let's fix it first and see where it gets us. In the mean time it's up to us, consumers, to boycott subpar products.
and this doesnt have the biggest ue problem major stutters
Id say it will only get worse in the future. Epic Games doesn't give a single F. bout performance. And when you ask "what about performance?" in either their streams or on the forum, you get banned.
1:00 omg the pure nostalgia hit with that original soundtrack.
original? that is not the original theme. Not the one i remember from shadow of chernobyl anyway
That is NOT the soundtrack from the first game
@@AeroFix94 The music that plays during the last part of the intro is in the original and clear sky.
@@wamba2097 i honestly cant hear it mate
@@AeroFix94 The name of the track is Radwind pt.1 and is in the first 2 games
15:16 I don't think this somehow related to the npc count. For example in any modern rtx there are thouthands of units with navigation logic, but nothing is lagging.
It is more likely that problem here is that all the npcs in the area are rendered and animated even though not all of them are visible. There was another game with the similar issue, which was fixed later, but it felt the same initially.
Thanks for coverage Alex, especially for pointing out missing flashlight shadows and aggressive trees lods. Those are really hurting the immersion and hopefully fix is on the way.
Praying hardware lumen comes in the next month
The judder even at high frame rates with Gsync makes it near-on unplayable for me
Glad it's not just me. I'm on a 4090 and 7800X3D and even with DLSS performance and it's horrible.
I’m guessing just lock the fps? I have a 4090 and this game really needs optimization.
You get what you pay for 🤣
I keep hearing about this but it runs butter smooth on my rig
7800x3d 4070 ti super
@@ANTANTANT360 Guys.. Google ”Stalker 2 mouse smoothing fix”. For some reason it’s a setting thats default/forced ON??? Instantly made everything feel 10x better after I turned it off, everything was just really off despite having locked 120fps before that… Running the same setup as you. Knew it was fking mouse smoothing when trying the game… in 2024 like COME ON devs haha
why isn’t anyone talking about how much this game was downgraded graphically from its reveal trailer?
The lack of shadows from flashlight and campfires and muzzle flash was super jarring especially knowing these are all present in the original games x-ray engine and we are 20 years old newer hardware 😅😅😅
Yes.. Absolutely disappointing🤦
Seriously sad.
For frame cap ALWAYS use MSI afterburner/Riva SS - its the best implementation of the framerate cap ever. Ingame caps and nvidia caps are a childs toy compared to that. Why? Because when u use MSI it does not only limit the frames, it takes care of frame-pacing. So if a frame is rendered too fast, it will hold the frame and than insert it at milisecond precise moment. So if u for example cap it at 60fps, every frame will be rendered at same 16.6ms. Almost all games have it wrong.
I get the same from the Nvidia control panel. They've been interchangeable for a couple of years now. The few use cases I have found where it doesn't, neither does RIVA SS.
Unless you use "front edge sync" which gives you a one frame delay(and nearly perfect framepacing), rtss and nvidia control panel use very similar framecap technique
@@teamworkop3712 RTSS is still better, you can change the cap in real time, you can set a global cap and more importantly, in many cases, it works just better for me, producing a flat frame-time graph and reducing latency. It can add nvidia reflex to games which dont use reflex. U can customize the framerate to the decimals in RTSS, which is handy as well. Well... to each his own, I use RTSS and I think its superior, feature wise and results wise.
if you cap your frames at 60fps might as well use vsync, I use frame limiter for 40/45 fps
@@kamiz0 no mate, if you use VSYNC always use a RTSS frame cap at 60 at the same time, it reduces latency... that is if you not on VRR, but I had 60hz monitor, used VSYNC and always enabled 60fps cap in RTSS - than move your mouse and thank me later.
I'm tired of RT, DLSS and Frame generation. Its gaslighting the gaming industry. Newer graphics card can't handle the games natively and need the upscaling algorythm to even play the games. And thats fault of the new way of making games with UE5 (as an example) that let devs just throw assets and never optimize anything at all.
Tree LOD pop-in is truly obnoxious. Why the hell not use UE5 Nanite to mitigate this? AI is janky too with NPCs often intersecting world geometry and other NPCs. A lot of quest script logic is broken too leading to minor glitches as well as game-breaking bugs.
Also, the most dangerous thing in the zone isn't anomalies or mutants, it's weapon reloads 😉
Why not just use a better engine?
@@FordHoard Like Unity? There seems little engine options to choose from for a game of this scale. Maybe they really should have improved on their existing tech? Difficult decision.
@dazecm There's plenty. I think they should have upgraded their old engine, or used the 4A engine from Metro.
iirc the earlier versions of UE5 that this game was built on dont support nanite vegetation, and its not trivial to port everything over to a newer version
Nanite can’t run on Series S
My main issue with broken or unfinished games (for whatever reason) is that I don’t give you broken and unfinished money with the promise of an IOU. Devs take my perfectly good money and invest it in their perfectly good bank account. Devs don’t take 80% of the fee and then take the rest when they finish the game. So it’s not fair, it’s not an even playing field. So make a perfectly good game to honour peoples investment of perfectly good money.
12:50 how to change color spaces?? I cannot see anything in this game
I think STALKER 2 might be the first major open world game that runs on UE5.
Saying that it "runs" is quite a statement. lol
@@BlackCanvasAudio Limps?
@@ThePreciseClimber Crawls perhaps
Fortnite runs on UE5
@@BlackCanvasAudio It's obviously very heavy. I wish they'd update it from 5.1 to a more recent UE version that isn't as heavy on the CPU & GPU.
Needs some patches, hopefully by the Ps5 release date
6:56 Well you're silly to think that. If you don't want to read subtitles, the accent helps tremendously with the immersion.
needs another video of optimal settings
This is the first game in years I haven't been able to run at 60FPS on my i7 9700K, RTX 3080 system.
An upgrade is not in the plans any time soon though. I will just enjoy gameplay videos of this game.
Because this literally runs like shit at its current state.
I hate that the English voices don't have accents. One of the best parts of the original.
Will there be a video about the best settings for PC? Like was done for RDR2? It really helped me to have a perfect gaming experience back then.
You might wait for a while. Given the state of the game.
Bro. Alex does 'best settings' for literally every game he covers.
Rdr2 setting actually changed some things. In this game FPS barely moves, only thing that does something are the shitty upscalers and framegen. Yuck
@@Szilagyicsabaistvan more than settings on pc rdr2 reducin grass distance on ini file help most. if you find smlilar forest grass setting on this game ini on pc reducing help ı guess but not smooth npc on village drop. those suggested settings on rdr2 also do nothing on towns espcialy city of game which heavly drop fps.
@@MrStrangermoon I was just playing Rdr2 not long ago. It runs like a dream compared to Stalker. Also, try reducing the Hair option to medium or low. It boosts FPS, especially in towns.
Unfinished Game Era 2014-2024...
Can the consumers please get a break? It's very hot out here.
If anybody feels attacked by this comment, just remember, I do not wish to attack you. You are free to love what you love, and when you choose to.
At least we have Warhammer this year. And Wukong
with foliage I wonder why didn't you mention half transparent dithered trees in the background and unmatching lod trees that pop into different trees when they get closer to camera, or sometimes super bright reflections of sky that is dark
The game also has an issue with a VRAM memory leak(?) or some kind of garbage collection issue after playing for extended periods. I have experienced this on both of my machines(5700x/4070ti & 7435hs/4070) where the amount of VRAM used will slowly increase until it maxes out and then performance will go from 70-100fps down to a powerpoint slide show of 8-10fps while maxing GPU utilization. Restarting the game is the only way to fix it and significantly lowers the amount of VRAM used in the same exact scene.
Yeah seems 2-3 hours and you gotta restart the game lol However after a restart Im running pretty damn smoothly for a while. Only had 1 hard lock/crash so far actually.
I just had a crazy memory leak I guess. But I wasn't even playing for that long (maybe 1 hour). Was playing just fine, and then the picture froze but audio continued. I pulled up task manager and my overall RAM usage was 99%. And I have 32GB of RAM! STALKER 2 was using ~26GB! It kept playing the audio of the game for a little bit and then the game crashed, as soon as the STALKER 2 process crashed my memory usage went down to ~20%.
STALKER 2 at release does look good, but is it just me or is this a downgrade from what has been shown in marketing gameplay trailers?
Especially on console. Xbox had this title at every major show and event and what they showed off looks far superior to what was actually released.
You guys are like the last bastion on UA-cam for reasonable discussion and objective reviews. It feels like everybody else is just yelling at everything all the time.
They are when they aren't shilling for Sony. when they do things that aren't released for Sony exclusively, they do a decent job.
@@OzzyFan80how’d they shill for Sony? Honest question. I’ve seen their videos where they cap on ps5 pro.
@@Dan-si8fp They were giving it honest critiques and then all of a sudden it was all overly positive talking points the honesty of all their prior criticisms stopped. It seems once IGN bought them they are afraid to do honest critiques on Sony items.
This!
NXGamer is better
I'm essentially running one of the most powerful builds you can get today (7950X 3D paired with 4090) and this game still tanks my system, even dropping everything from Epic to High. However, I have not tried the framerate cap. Looking forward to seeing what that does.
Exact same system. Stutter galore. If it’s this bad for us I hate to think what it’s like for people on hardware from a few generations back
Similar setup but with a 4070 Ti. Because I'm always GPU bound I think I'm seeing less of the stuttery mess. Except for in town, town is brutal.
Game feels terrible even on a high end PC. Capping to 60fps is still bad and not really a solution for such a high end setup.
7700x and 4090 here and my performance has been excellent at 4k. Perhaps give AtlasOS a try?
@@Phil_529 for what it’s worth I tried it out and it crashed after 5 minutes two times. That’s the only setting I changed. Bumped it back up to uncapped and stopped crashing, lol
This is a game where I just wonder why there appears to have studio bias . The critique uses such soft language and carefully crafted comments compared to when black myth wukong was reviewed and when it was discussed. I'd say black myth wukong performed better, was much more technically competent and polished, yet it was much more harshly reviewed. It seems like it's the typical "China is bad" and "Ukraine can do no wrong." I'm a fan of both games but my goodness, there is a giant difference in tone when discussing certain studios and games.
With that being said, I still think the reviews are very competent, highly educational, and professional. Its just an appearance of studio bias that I notice in reviews in recent years.
It's exactly this. This feels as one of the less objective DF analysis in history...
Who in the world expects objectivity from USians ?
Black Myth Wukong, the game that's a full seven points higher on Metacritic than Stalker, was somehow reviewed more harshly ? That Black Myth Wukong ?
Well, one of those games was made during a freaking war. I think you can give that studio a bit of leeway, while fairly criticizing the game's shortcomings.
@tyrus1235 that isn't relevant. I am not criticisng the game or the studio but pointing out the way DF has been overly critical with games that are technically and performantly better than other games they dance around their wording. Its not just this game. Even some indy games like No rest for the wicked (i think is the name). I got the early access game based on their review and it was wrong and misleading. The studio basically was getting sold off from the publisher right after they were saying it was one of the best games they have played and it's only gonna get way better in early access.
I don't think this would be something that DF does (maybe it is) but I would love to see a deep dive on why the NPCs are so heavy on the CPU in a very specific and detailed way.
To understand how threaded something like that is, and how adding more NPCs affects it, and all of the different things it must be checking constantly to be occupying CPU cycles so heavily.
I know nothing about how game development works, so I would love to see a deep dive exploring how, down to how each line of code, it affects CPU performance, and what features when programmed in, are the heaviest (and things like that).
It’s not so simple to just look at a games code like this lol
I have a problem on Xbox sx in this game. It is like there is no dead zone on sticks on Xbox controller. I tried to play on two gamepads and nothing changes. Is it only my problem? No one talks about that, how to fix this?
This has been confirmed by the devs and is in the pipeline for a fix. I had to put my sensitivity all the way up to help with this. Also, the stick drift is reeeaaalllyyyy bad.
Holy 40 fps on a 4090 and Ryzen 7. And fanboys would tell you to get a better PC because they are absolutely fine with this...
In 4K?
@@rizunifywith dlss on quality...... Imagine spending that much on a PC for it to run at 35-40 FPS it is honestly extremely laughable i'm ngl..... Devs nowadays release their shitty optimized and unfinished games and expect us to pay full 70 dollars for it
@@alexanderluna1845 Yeah man that's the environment these graphics cards have encouraged. This is the world NVIDIA wanted.
did they play an old build? i never got that 6 second freezes when entering towns on xbox. Just curious
This is an amazing breakdown. Now waiting for PC optimised settings. Hopefully RTX 3080 is included in the optimised settings.
Not gonna do much because the main bottleneck in this game is the CPU. Gonna get about same fps at 1080p low as 4K high.
@jose131991 yep I'm expecting same! Only if this game had an NPC setting that we could dial down.
@@TechnoSiD25 The NPCs are already few in number and low in reactivity/complexity, dialing them down basically mean removing them from the game altogether! 😆
What are you talking about? I run it on 4060 laptop in ultra with 60 fps with ryzen 5 7535hs cpu. No cpu bottleneck. 1080p.
@@skinscalp222yeah, they don't do shit, how tf do they draw so much performance?
Please make a guide for improving performance with all the steps and tools you guys use to optimize games and systems.
Its all so tiresome. Every game these days has an official launch and then a real launch when its actually playable. They should have called this early access.
I'm really surprised by not seeing any mention of the ridiculous amount of shimmering that show up on screen when you turn upscalers and TAA off and how much smearing and ghosting there is with TAA on. I can't get a clear image in this game no matter what I do and it's really annoying. Things only look good when I'm standing still. I expected a mention of it at least.
TRS used its UE (((
Digital foundry seem to love DLSS and TAA. Anything temporal that turns what should be sharp 4k into a blurry mess the second you move the mouse. Never seen digital foundry call it out.
@@HoneyTwee I know but I thought they would call it out in this game. I use DLSS all the time and in no other game it has looked this bad for me. Even with DLSR or DSR+DLAA it looks like shit.
@@onurkaya167 I've not actually managed to launch the game yet since launch, too busy. But terrible TAA isn't uncommon. The worst example I can think of is red dead 2. So I'll have to see how it compares to that.
@@HoneyTwee TAA on is almost as bad but native is much worse than RDR2. I've never seen shimmer like this anywhere else.
Sub-HD resolutions on modern consoles are becoming a scary norm at this point.
Thank god for the Unreal Engine 5 to make all this possible. Devs were lazy and incompetent before. But with this engine, they reach new heights.
This game is a broken mess on Series X the lighting sucks the performance sucks the movement and controls has noticable judder the textures are low quality there is no immersion in this game I'm disappointed I'll check it out again next year hopefully it's patched and fixed by the then
hey DF this game needs another 6 months of work, not just this day-one patch
thx.
Let us all pray for The Witcher 4
they will have it figured no doubt but it will be very intensive and 30fps only thats pretty much a given
Performance issues will be the last problem of the Woker 4.
That screen tearing
Great and accurate review ! I'm glad the day one patch fixed a lot of the issues, it's still not perfect but I'm having a blast with the game.
How do I force Motion Blur on, it would be nice to add some instructions to the description below the video.
Same, would be really nice to have a guide
For people on PC that want to force motion blur scaling by changing it in the config file: Go to: " Users\'change to user'\AppData\Local\Stalker2\Saved\GameSettings " and make changes in the "AppliedSettings.cfg" -> "MotionBlurScale = 1.0"
For game pass version:
C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\Local\Stalker2\Saved\GameSettings\AppliedSettings.cfg
There should be a “motionblurscale=1” setting, however increasing the number from 1 to 2 or 3, didn’t visually changed anything on my end.
Not 100% sure if this is the solution Alex was mentioning.
@@togrulalekperov1335 which setting? is it the motion blur scale?
@@MEzZ117 i would assume so.. but again, it didn’t work on my end or i just didn’t noticed it..
What about using frame gen.? Should you add cap then and to what value?
this game will be an absolute blast in 3 years, having all the patches, dlcs and community mods
I have to disagree on the English voice acting. It's good but the accents from the old STALKER games were a big part of the charm, spawning iconic lines like "Get out of here Stalker", and "I said come in, don't stand there". The good middle ground would be to have varied accents, it would also be more authentic and diverse.
Which one of three original games is the best to start with?
Kinda doesn't matter. SoC and CoP are the standout ones, and SoC came first. Clear Sky doesn't hold up so well. There are many great heavy modded versions about which are worth using after the initial play throughs.
Been excited for this game since pre-this gen launch trailer. Didn't play Stalker1. With 2, I am playing on Series S and PC--while the game is quite surprising on Series S (really, it looks good and has a stable 30), but I am fortunate enough to have a PC that will run the game at 100+fps on Epic, and there is a significant improvement. After the patches, the game does not suffer from those crazy bugs other, earlier reviews mentioned. My biggest wish? Muzzle flash and other lights being able to cast shadows. I agree with Alex that for a 2007 game, those features made Stalker 1 very impressive, and I would love to see that feature implemented with such high assets that are in 2. Give us muzzle flash and fire shadow casting! :D Great game so far.
Edit: I play on a gaming laptop, so running at 1080p using the built in monitor is why I'm getting 100+fps. rtx 4070, 64GB DDR5, i7 processor (not sure the speed).
Another unfinished game launched, what a surprise
Would be nice if you disclosed what setting for motionblurscale was used in the config to fix the issue???
The fact that they were even able to ship a game in the middle of a war is impressive in of its own
Not a valid excuse
The game was largely developed in Prague, Czech Republic since 2021 or 2022.
@@Radek494they moved to Czechia after the war. Also a lot of the employees remained in Ukraine. Also take the office fire and the hacking into account
@@fllmerpit is not an excuse but an explanation. It is completely understandable that there are performance issues in a UE5 game, the series of which is known for jank, all while having to relocate your employees to another country and make an office there, survive an office fire and defend your files from being hacked.
@@fllmerpYou make a game in the middle of a war 😉
By golly, but do these guys know how to showcase a game's visuals. Been watching other STALKER comparisons and its night and day.
I think people should stop comparing Metro (a linear shooter) with a game such as Stalker 2 (a persistent open world across a 60KM+ square mile map with dynamic weather. Just because some ex GSC devs worked on Metro, and the vibe is similar does not warrant direct comparison. Stalker 2 has a range of issues that, lets be honest, were expected by anyone who has seen releases in the last few years. We can all get top end CPUs and 4090 GPUs and there will still be limitations at the development level as games are overcomplex and seem to be designed to rely on upscalers to run. That being said, I am enjoying Stalker 2 so far, it was free on GamePass so I have no reason to be salty. And if I get tired of it, I'll just go back to the GAMMA mod!
Calling Metro linear is a bit of injustice to the open sandbox 'levels' that are there. It feels open world. I will play Stalker 2 but in at least 12 months time, which is my approach for all new games!
@environm3ntalist549 I didn't mean it in a negative way. Just pointing out the differences in the flow of the game. I haven't played the most recent Metro but my understanding was that once you completed a level then you would not be able to go back to it (to make new discoveries etc), so I class that as linear as you are only moving forward. They are beautiful in atmosphere though and few games got my adrenaline pumping than having a cracked gas mask while being assaulted by flying monstrosities 😂
It’s just a bunch of cry babies that can’t run the game on their ryzen 0 0000x. Not worth paying attention to.
@@Grieva-SeeD- you are right of course in terms of forward progression. Those 'levels' are big and worldy though. Feels like 4 or 5 worlds in 1 at times.
@@Trickzter1337 I agree with the point you are making here. I have a 5800x3D and a 6700xt. I don't expect miracles and I get a reasonable experience. It's a new game and each year that passes my hardware gets less competent at modern releases. There are some serious optimisations that are needed here though, I'm sure we can all agree on that.
No optimised settings? 😢
That would require some actual effort, this vid was clearly rushed.
@@CatLover_69 Lol, right. Where's your vid?
@@CatLover_69 Right, one of the few (more or less 4) channels YT that tests and points out technical issues rushes their videos. If only they were like the plethora of reviewers who take their time so they can say their useless opinion about a game. DF could release 3 videos on this game within the same week, including an optimized setting video, and people like you wouldn't be satisfied.
Optimized settings is always a separate piece because it's a lot of effort.
Hopefully dynamic shadow-casting lighting can be added via mods for PC.
Does anyone else have issues with high input lag?
Also, motion blur doesn't work.
Lag seems ok for a 30fps console game but no motion blur no or at least very low
A vast amount of input lag is caused by mouse smoothing. Which you can disable via Input.ini. Googling "stalker 2 disable mouse smoothing" will get you the _how_.
Frame generation, disable it if you use it.
Make sure you're using proper fullscreen display mode and NOT windowed borderless (or whatever it's called).
FG is a big issue for that. BUT this title feels sluggish regardless. It’s like
Wading through mud at all times. 🤷
how to force motion blur through the config file ??
upvote
@@colonelmoeitz9855 Not sure if it's the same as Alex used: under C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Stalker2\Saved\Config\WinGDK - GameUserSettings.ini - set sg.MotionBlurQuality=3
Go to: " Users'change to user'\AppData\Local\Stalker2\Saved\GameSettings "
so can you destroy indoors lights or use light switches in this game, totally hate baked indoor lighting
No wonder the review embargo was lifted just before the game was released, the game is a massive shit show, ppl trying to defend it 🤣🤣
10 hours Xbox series x
Run perfect
@@dentalnecrothe video literally shows it running poorly, meanwhile you are stating otherwise. The classic "run fine on my system". You don't have a special, unique xbox that magically runs it better than for everyone else.
@@FranklinSantana-ye6wl Xbox series x
Quality mode
Run perfect like in the video
So what ?
everyone: day one patch
alex: day zero patch
Anyone knows the Song at 0:04 please?
Nothing but respect for the Ukrainian developers, but I will wait for the patches & sale.
Even if you'll buy it for full price you'll never regret. Game is awesome. ❤
your contribution counts💙💛
@@GREATVOVA Nope it is dated and subpar on almost every aspect. From UI, AI, Gunplay, Gameplay, Dialogue, Voice-Acting, Enemy Design.
@@John-ns9lr I'm 45 hours into it. Game is great. And you?
@@GREATVOVA Uninstalled after 3 hours, game is utter garbage
Its nice to see Digital Foundry and the lads are making the switch to Bluesky.
Excellent video as always! Looking forward to the continued improvement of this game!
🤡🤡🤡
So they lied. The guy they had doing an interview said it was 60fps majority of the time with drops to 55 on series x. Oof.
This game is not finished. A-life 2.0 is absolutely broken - if not completely non-existent.
They should not have released this game yet. This is so disappointing.
STALKER tradition.
@xaverpan6131 No. It's not cute anymore. Stop accepting mediocrity.
what frametime cap is recommended for PC? I don't trust RTSS that much as sometimes it can stutter but the graph is flat