STALKER 2’s first FPS optimization guide is already out, and it’s a doozy

STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl is pretty darn good if you disregard its obviously broken A-Life systems, and it’s getting much-deserved attention already. It really doesn’t run well at all, though. In fact, STALKER 2‘s performance is ridiculously poor, but the community is already here to change that.

While I certainly didn’t expect my RTX 4070 to be able to max out STALKER 2 on day one, I also didn’t anticipate it would struggle as much as it has. Sure, cranking the settings down to their lowest possible options gets me results, but not to the extent to which you’d expect, and I’m hardly the only one having problems here. It’s not just the sheer FPS you’ve got to worry about here, either: frame-times are all over the place in STALKER 2, and enforcing a somewhat reasonable FPS cap seems virtually impossible at this time. Not like we didn’t see this coming, given the game’s reliance on Unreal Engine 5, but it’s whatever.

Thankfully, STALKER enjoys a huge community of modders, and we’ve already got our first configuration file tweaks to fall back upon.

Boost your STALKER 2 FPS with these handy configuration file tweaks

Going ham at TheDonDope’s awesome selection of configuration file tweaks will make STALKER 2 look like it was released 15-odd years ago. Yes, it sure as heck is going to make it playable, but the graphics will suffer. It’s a give and a take, as usual with these things, but I highly recommend giving these a once-over regardless.

Notably, TheDonDope uses a humble but capable RTX 2060 to play the game, and they’ve managed to get a fairly stable 60-80 FPS across the board after applying a series of configuration file mods to STALKER 2. That’s no mean feat! Tuning highlights include:

• The ability to lower the in-game 3D rendering resolution beyond the scope of upscaling tech
• Optional Lumen and ray-tracing toggles
• Massive render quality reductions, if needed (foliage, post-process, etc.)
• Frame Rate Smoothing toggles

And loads more. Even if you’re not keen on fiddling around with these, though, you may well be interested in the ability to turn off mouse smoothing and acceleration, which largely does away with STALKER 2‘s anomalously hobbled camera controls. It’s a doozy, honestly.

On my end, a mix of High and Medium settings (with ‘Epic’ anti-aliasing, because good grief is there a lot of foliage here) with a few of TheDonDope’s tweaks has resulted in a genuinely satisfying gameplay experience already. My RTX 4070 can now generally keep up with the game across the board, and it doesn’t even really falter much below 60 FPS.

Further, I do believe GSC Game World will be able to improve the game’s performance beyond this point. To say nothing of a more comprehensive set of optimization mods that are bound to be on the horizon already.

I am far more concerned with the game’s A-Life problems at this time, instead. GSC Game World has already confirmed that the community’ suspicions that A-Life wasn’t even in the game are incorrect, but this does mean that something’s gone horribly wrong in the launch build of the game. We do not yet know how long it might take for this to be resolved, but I do think A-Life is a bigger concern for STALKER 2 than its humdrum optimization and performance at large. And that’s saying something.