Stalker 2 is finally out for PCs and Xbox Series X/S consoles, and is the exciting new sequel in the Stalker universe, releasing 15 years after Call of Pripyat. Being built on top of Unreal Engine 5, the game offers stunning visuals and amazing scalability on low end hardware.
Stalker 2 is optimized surprisingly well, and can run on mid-tier PC hardware without major hiccups or glitches.
Regardless, there do exist a few settings which can help further fine tune your experience for a smoother, more consistent frame rate – which will be discussed below.
Optimized Stalker 2 PC settings
Graphics
- Overall Quality: Custom
- Texture Quality: Epic; lower if you have a card with low VRAM
- Hair: Epic; lower to improve performance
- Object Details: Epic
- Effects Quality: Epic
- Materials: Epic
- Post-Processing: Epic
- Anti-Aliasing: Epic
- Motion Blur Quality: Off; user preference
- Motion Blur Strength: Off
- Depth of Field: Epic
- Light Shafts: Enabled
- Sharpness: 20%, user preference
- Upscaling method: DLSS; use FSR if you have a card that cannot use DLSS
- Upscaling Quality: Quality; lower to Performance if you have a weaker GPU
- FSR 3 Frame Generation: Enabled; can be disabled if you face ghosting
- Shading Quality: Epic
- Global Illumination: Epic
- Reflections: Epic
- Shadow Quality: Epic
- Clouds: Epic
- Fog: Epic
- Sky: Epic
- Foliage Quality: Epic
- Environment Draw Distance: Epic
Display
- Screen Mode: Fullscreen [Borderless]; can be switched to Windowed if you like to multi task
- Field of View: 95
- V-Sync: Disabled; always keep disabled
- Frame Rate: Unlimited
- NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency: Disabled
- Contrast/Brightness/Gamma: 50%
- Image Encoding: sRGB (LDR)
The following configuration was tested using an Nvidia RTX 4060 and an AMD Ryzen 5800X, coupled with 32 GB of RAM. The test machine produced a smooth locked 60 frames per second.
It is reassuring to see some modern PC releases optimize for the platform.
